Every election, volunteers with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-SoCal fan out to vote centers across the region to ensure voters have access to materials in different languages and bilingual poll workers.

But this year these poll monitors are being asked to do more: Look for anti-Asian intimidation or rhetoric in or around the vote centers.

This comes after a pair of incidents in Orange County. A man was arrested this month by Huntington Beach police after allegedly spray-painting anti-Asian slurs onto signs for Democratic Congressional candidate Dave Min.

And in Little Saigon, there’ve been protests over mailers sent by Republican Representative Michelle Steel that try to portray her Democratic rival Derek Tran as having ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Demonstrators have accused the Congress member of weaponizing anti-Communist sentiments commonly-held in Little Saigon against Tran, the son of Vietnamese refugees.

“Anti-Asian rhetoric and red-baiting language against Asian American candidates can have damaging effects,” said Connie Chung Joe, CEO of AAAJ-SoCal. “Historically, we’ve seen this happen to Asian candidates, and what ugliness and anti-Asian hate happens.”

An open letter

The recent incidents prompted Joe and other Asian American leaders from around the state to warn in an open letter to the two major party protests over mailers in Orange County that “false narratives” and “racialized scapegoating” of Asian American candidates “increase hatred and create harm against all Asian Americans.”

Joe worried about a repeat of the 2020 presidential election, which coincided with the pandemic and a surge in anti-Asian attacks.

“We heard of a lot of people just being scared to go out to the polling booths, be at the vote centers and voting in person, because they were worried at that time we had so much anti-Asian hate,” Joe said.

Focus on Orange County

AAAJ-SoCal has already recruited 120 poll monitors, many of them coming from law firms. If you’re interested, sign up quickly because there is requisite training.

You don’t have to be bilingual but knowing another language will come in handy when conducting exit interviews with voters on how the voting process went — another new ask of volunteers this year.

More volunteers than in elections past will be asked to visit a vote center in Orange County. Joe said the plan is to send dispatch monitors to 48 vote centers in Orange County — up from 28 during the primary.

Joe noted that more than a quarter of Orange County’s population is Asian American Pacific Islander and multiple races have AAPI candidates.

Also, “there’s less infrastructure in O.C. compared to L.A. for voting rights and civic engagement work, so we just think there’s more opportunities to be down there and look out for any challenges or issues that might arise for our community,” Joe said.