Tuesday is the first U.S. election Gilsy Peña is eligible to vote in.
She’s from Santiago de Caballeros in the Dominican Republic and recently became a U.S. citizen.
Peña said voting in the U.S. is very different, so she visited a workshop from the Community Engagement Training Center in Nashua last week to learn more about what to do when she gets to the polling place.
“As a Latino, you can get lost in a way,” she said in Spanish. “I’ll be there, but I don’t know what I’m going to face.”
Other attendees nodded along. Several new citizens visited the workshop and said figuring out a new voting system can be intimidating.
They also spoke about challenges in finding information about candidates, communicating with election officials and learning the nuts and bolts of casting a ballot.
Director Ángela Mercado said these kinds of questions are important to answer – especially for voters who are naturalized citizens.
She said it’s common to hear stories of confused voters who prefer to walk out of a polling place instead of casting a ballot. To help address these concerns, Mercado hosted a series of small group workshops in Spanish.
She answered common questions, spoke about voters’ rights and handed out bilingual resources on voting. Like all citizens, she emphasized Latinos have rights at the polls --including the right to bring in election materials, have an interpreter, and register to vote at their polling place.
She said she hoped participants would share what they learned with their networks and encouraged them to take extra materials to share.
“If you already read the booklet and already got the information, you can give it to your neighbor,” she said in Spanish. “It’s never bad to have too much information.”
