Lisa García Bedolla, Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and Chair of Berkeley’s Center for Latino Policy Research, has some engaging thoughts on how to diversity California’s electorate, which is strangely uniform given the increasingly varied composition of the state’s population as a whole.
Earlier this year the James Irvine Foundation launched the Voter Outreach and Technology Initiative (VOTE), which in their own words is “experimenting with how to effectively incorporate new technologies to expand the impact of voter outreach and increase voter participation among underrepresented communities.” Garcia Bedolla was tapped to head it up.
“I think that we’ve passed a number of really important reforms that we know can make a difference….but I think we have to take this momentum and now do the hard work on the ground to make it real and really change the electorate,” she said.
We caught up with her earlier this year at the Future of California Elections (FOCE) conference in Los Angeles and asked her a few questions about expanding the number and types of people who head to the polls in California.
