More than 200,000 new voters could be heading to the polls on Tuesday for the New Hampshire presidential primary. Among them are many new Americans.
Organizers across the state have been reaching out to new U.S. citizens and first-time voters to make the process more accessible. Clement Kigugu is the executive director and founder of Overcomers Refugee Services, which provides resources for refugees and immigrants across the state.
Kigugu joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa at the Tilt’n Diner to talk about voter outreach to new Americans in the state.
Transcript
Clement, you've been out in the community and you're trying to get more folks out to the polls for the primary. Can you tell me what your work looks like?
Thank you so much again for inviting me. So, as you said, my name is Clement Kigugu. I'm the executive director of Overcomers Refuge Services. We were lucky to have the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation to help new Americans to register and to vote. So we have been doing this for almost two or three years.
So what we do we go out to our clients or people that we help. We hired the outreach people to go there— the people who speak different languages, especially Kinyarwanda, Swahili and Nepali to reach those people. So we went house to house and asked them if they are U.S. citizens and if they [are] already registered to vote or if they already voted. We take their names, and so we help them [with] transportation, registration and help them with all the process and also education.
So a lot of work there.
Yes it is.
And in addition to that, Overcomers Refugee Services also teaches classes on civics and becoming a U.S. citizen. Can you tell us more about that?
Yes. So we start this program through the volunteer program. We do have people who have been here for long, who know the system, to teach one-on-one classes. [Initially] it was hard for some people to be in a class due to different levels of English. So we have volunteers who do one-on-one classes. They come to our office, or they meet at a library, or Catch Neighborhood—[the organization] gave us a place where they can meet—or community center in Concord. They meet and teach them from the beginning, from vocabulary to writing and civics. As you know, there are 100 questions [that] they need to learn. So they go really from the beginning until the end, helping them to prepare for the interview and [become] familiar with the accent. I can teach them, but with my accent it would be hard. But if they have someone who was born here [teach them], it's much easier to be really familiar with the accent when they go to an interview.
And some of the stuff that they learn in these classes, is that knowledge that they can take when it comes to registering to vote or figuring out where to go on Election Day? Does that knowledge apply to what we might be doing in the primaries in the next few days?
No, they pretty much focus on the 100 questions [that] they ask. And then, when they become U.S. citizens, that's where we pick it up to educate them [on] the process of registering, voting and what documents they need to be able to go to vote.
Clement, you worked with Secretary of State David Scanlan, our top election official, to make a video about voting in New Hampshire and how to make it more accessible to new Americans. What were some of the things that you talked about in that video and that you talked about with Secretary Scanlan?
Thank you so much. That was really a good opportunity. And thank you so much to the Secretary of State for organizing [the video]. First of all, I told them about immigrants or refugees, why they're here, why we, as Overcomers Refugee Services, came out to help those refugees because they have so many issues. And one of the issues was really to get citizenship and be able to vote. One of the issues I brought was, first of all, to register them because some of them, they don't really speak good English. That's one thing. The transportation issues, [and] the language barrier when they go to vote. I remember the first time when I went to the clerk to help them to vote, they were saying, ‘No, you cannot help him because he has to vote himself.’ But I said, ‘I'm not going to tell him who he's going to vote [for].’ I was just going to show him the process, how to check the names, for example. So that was really an issue that we brought out. We just told them that we should be there to help with interpretation, the process, the context, not who they need to vote [for]. That was pretty much the issue.
So you talked about accessibility when it comes to language in this video that you partnered with the secretary on. Do you feel like the state is taking enough steps to make voting more accessible? When it comes to language or other barriers that folks might face, is the state doing enough?
There's a really, really big change. Last time when we took people [to vote], for example, at the community center, they were able to let us go in and help. I had a man who's 81 years old. So they really let me go in, and help him and show him what he needed to do. [They were] actually willing to provide an interpreter to be there, just to make sure that everybody understands and everybody's comfortable and everybody feels welcome to vote.
And out of curiosity, what are the languages that New Hampshire provides voting materials in? Is that something you've been working on? Are they broad?
There's so many languages. But for Overcomers, for example, we do provide four languages. So Kinyarwanda, Swahili, Nepali, [and] Arabic. But when you go to the secretary of state’s website, they may have many languages that [people] can use to access voting, documentation.
You work with a lot of people: new Americans, first time voters. And I'd love to hear about one of them specifically. Could you tell me the story of one person who you've worked with, who is voting for the first time on Tuesday?
There's a lady who's a single mom. She has three kids. So one of the testimonies she gave us was that she was born in Congo, DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo. And she went to Rwanda in a refugee camp where she spent 20 years in a refugee camp. So she was really concerned because she wasn’t a citizen in one of those countries. She didn't have to go to Congo because she was a refugee, and also she didn't have a citizenship. So when she came here, she didn't understand how all [of] the process [works], but she was able to get her citizenship and be able to vote. So she was very, very happy and proud to be part of the country and have our citizenship.
