Influence at a Distance

BEFORE SUNDAY, if Dulce Sanchez wanted to vote in her country's election, she had to buy a ticket and hop a plane to the Dominican Republic. Planning a vacation around an election was not the best way to ensure voter turnout and nurture the country's young democracy.

"I've voted before, but not always, because it's too expensive to fly back," says Sanchez, who has lived in New York for 20 years. She spent Mother's Day with her mother and two daughters, sitting on the median of Broadway in Washington Heights and waving to cars that passed as part of a parade for the Social Christian Reformist party, the smallest of the Dominican Republic's three major parties. She wore red; her mother clutched a rose, matching the red of her political party as cars honked and merengue streamed out of open windows.

"We've got to celebrate like a party to let everyone know about the election," she says.

There was much to celebrate. For the first time, Dominicans living abroad voted in Sunday's presidential election from their adopted homes in New York and Dominican strongholds as far-flung as Canada and Spain. Despite low registration, the election vindicated the role New York Dominicans play in affairs back home.

While estimates vary, some put the amount remitted last year by Dominicans living in New York at approximately $850 million. The opportunity to vote is a long-awaited recognition of the support Dominicans outside the country give to families at home.

"We contribute to our country as much as people in the Dominican Republic," says Rhina Michel, a volunteer for the Dominican Revolutionary party. "Why can't we have someone hear our voice?"

Politically, the election was a referendum of the presidency of Hipólito Mejía, who lost Sunday against former president Leonel Fernández and his Dominican Liberation Party. In New York it had broader implications for the future. Having suffered elections compromised by voter fraud in the past, the absentee voting was a hopeful sign that the country's democratic institutions could ensure a fair vote count abroad.

Cars double-parked and voters waited in lines outside 16 schools in the five boroughs. Inside the cafeteria of P.S. 192 on 138th St., delegates from the country's three major political parties as well as election observers made sure that the vote was orderly. Voter identification cards were checked and cross-checked between lists held by election officials and party onlookers. ^^^

Mario Serrano, an electoral observer from the non-profit Participacion Ciudadana, sat on the windowsill. He called the turn-out a "good start." Serrano, a Jesuit priest at Saint Aloysius on W. 132nd St., said that most of his Dominican parishioners did not register to vote before the January deadline.

"There was not a huge information campaign about the process of registering," he says. "That's why there's a small number of voters for our large community."

Perhaps owing to voter skepticism and lack of funds to educate the public, only 52,000 registered to vote outside the Dominican Republic, including 24,000 voters in New York, according to Jose Fernandez, president of the Dominican Election Board of New York. Fernandez said his office in Times Square had been open to anyone wanting to register to vote for six months prior to the January deadline.

There are approximately 500,000 Dominicans living in the city, according to the 2000 census, the largest community outside the Dominican Republic. Many say the number is probably closer to 750,000 including illegal immigrants.

The relatively small numbers of voters did not diminish the intensity of those planning to vote. For more than two weeks leading up to the presidential election, rallies and parades felt more like summer carnivals than the made-for-tv specials that dominate the American electoral landscape. There were no politicians' speeches, but there was merengue and bachata, much honking of horns and flashing of political colors.

For a few weeks, the red state-blue state dichotomy of American politics was replaced by more tropical colors like the Dominican Liberation (PLD) party's purple, the Dominican Revolutionary (PRD) party's azure blue and white and the socialist red of the Social Christian Reformist party (PRSC). On Mother's Day, at the corner of 135th and Broadway, the departure point for parades and rallies, a Mexican woman serving a rainbow of shaved-ice flavors made up the difference.

A caravan of PRD supporters turned north onto Broadway, their white flags trailing from well-polished mini-vans, SUVs and Lincoln Town Cars, the vehicle of choice for livery drivers. For a culture in love with cars, this was a Dominican-style parade.

No sooner had the fleet departed than a throng of political supporters from the PLD converged to shout political protests at the drivers. A woman with curlers in her hair ran out of the Fantasy Hair Spa on 142nd St., where a sign of PLD candidate Leonel Fernandez hung in the window. She brandished a broom at the passing cars.

Inside the Dominican-owned Spanish Coffee Shop on 145th St. on Saturday, the election was on the mind of Marco Agramonte, who works behind the counter and sends part of his weekly pay home. Standing in front of a sign for PLD candidate Leonel Fernandez, Agramonte explained why, if he'd registered in time, he would have voted against Mejia, though he voted for him in 2000.

"I used to send $50 weekly to my mom and that was enough to provide food for a week," he says. "And now I send $65 but buy the things they used to." [it doesn't]

When he came to New York from the Dominican Republic two and a half years ago, the peso was valued at 17.5 per dollar. Today that number has grown to 46. He says that inflation has caused his mother to buy less meat and inferior-quality rice, a commodity that has almost quadrupled in price. For Agramonte, $65 totaled about a quarter of his weekly income.

Given the worsening economic conditions, he worried that voters in the Dominican Republic could be swayed to vote for a political party in exchange for handouts of food or promises of jobs in the local government. As a student, an official from the PLD offered him such a job during the 1998 senate elections.

"Those hungry people, if you go to their house and give them food, they'll believe you and vote for you," he says.

The long-term value of absentee voting will be felt when such tactics have less influence, he says.

"Here if we like a candidate, we see it's because he's better, not because he gives us a 20-pound bag of rice," Agramonte says.

For Dominicans wary of an electoral process that has a reputation for being corrupt, establishing a good track record here in New York will go a long way toward strengthening democratic institutions in Santo Domingo, the capital.

"Its about credibility. People don't believe that there would be an election here," says Jose Fernandez, the president of the Dominican Election Board in New York.

"Depending on how this process goes, it will encourage Dominicans to vote," Fernandez says. "In the future, by 2008, we could have up to 300,000 registered voters."