A close look at OC Chinese-American Voting potential and Promotion

TP-1546  12/15   12849  
5.0/2 

Orange County is the 5th largest voting jurisdiction in the nation with 1.4 million registered voters, while Asian is accounted for 18% of OC total 3 million residents. How does Chinese American do in terms of voter registration and turnout? Let’s take a close look at data collected by the OC registrar Office.

First, we compared three largest ethnic groups in OC from the perspectives from total population down to active voters, Table 1. We can quickly conclude the following facts:

  1. 1.      Asian is the third largest ethnic group behind White and Hispanic in population and eligible voters.
2.      Asian is the second largest group in registered voters. This is simply due to very low Hispanic voter registration ratio. Asian is doing a fair job on voter registration as a whole.
3.      Active voter ratio is very similar across ethnicities.

Table 1: OC Ethnicity Voter Overview

Total

Asian

White

Hispanic

General Population

~3000000

18%

43%

34%

Eligible Voters

~2000000

12%

~60%

25%

Registered Voters

1733717

8.0%

~84%

6.30%

Active Voters

1412677

7.80%

~85%

6.20%

Asian – only count Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese

Active voter – voted at least once in last 4 years

 

Now, let’s look into Asians and compare Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese in OC. This can give a good picture of how these three groups behave and participate in elections.  We can draw a very noticeable conclusion, that is Chinese has a significant lower registration ratio than both Korean and Vietnamese, only higher than Hispanic. This simply tells us that there is much to be done to get Chinese American registered.

Table 2: OC Asian Voter Breakdown

Chinese

Korean

Vietnamese

Citizen Population

72980

63647

168220

Eligible Voters

60520

49966

132712

Registered Voters

23783

27720

87123

Active Voters

19033

22575

68454

Registration Ratio

39.3%

55.5%

65.6%

Active Ratio

80%

81%

78.7%

 

Table 3 below gives a glimpse of where Chinese voters live in OC. About 55% Chinese voters live in 6 cities and Irvine holds the largest concentration of Chinese-American voters with 33.3%. Irvine is the city that we shall focus on.

Table 3: OC Chinese-American Voter Distribution

Irvine

6531

33.30%

Anaheim

994

5.20%

Fullerton

1009

5.20%

Huntington Beach

932

4.90%

Yorba Linda

787

4.10%

Tustin

766

3.90%

 

Another aspect to look into how Chinese-American performs in US elections is the voter turnout. Table 4 shows clearly that:

1.      Chinese turnout is slowly improving, the turnout gap with OC general population has been shrinking from 17.4% in 2010 to just 4.6% in 2014. Various efforts to promote participation in Chinese community shall contribute to this improvement.
2.      Turnouts within Asians are quite close each other. 

Table 4: Voter Turnouts

OC General

Chinese

Korean

Vietnamese

2010 General Election

55.40%

38%

n/a

n/a

2012 General Election

67.30%

59.60%

55.60%

57.70%

2014 General Election

44.96%

40.35%

n/a

n/a

 

Also, there are two groups of voters in Chinese-American community, voters who need language assistance and voters who have no language barrier. Those who request language assistance represent 25.85% of total Chinese-American voters.

Through this analysis, it can be concluded that for the time being, much attention shall be on how to increase voter registration among eligible Irvine Chinese-American. Community collaborations are needed to push more Chinese registered. If the Chinese-American voter registration was brought to the average level of 60%, it equals 12000 additional voters. In Irvine alone, there will be about 4000 potential new Chinese-American voters, a 60% increase from current level. More importantly, more than 3000 of them will be active voters.  Reasons are as followings,

1.      Chinese-American registration rate is lower than any other major ethnic groups.
2.      Irvine represents 1/3 of all Chinese voters in OC.
3.      Even though Chinese-American voter turnout is still lagging, but the gap is a lot smaller, stands at 5% right now. Chinese-Americans active voter ratio is identical to other Asian ethnic groups.