Mission Statement

The Asian American Education Institute is a non-partisan 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to establishing programs to educate the Asian American community about civics and the political process.

Programs To Empower Asian Pacific Islander Americans

Non-partisan Asian American Voter Education Program.  This program is a non-partisan voter education campaign dedicated to educating hundreds of thousands of Asian or Pacific Islander American “decline-to-state” (DTS) voters in California about their specific rights to request ballots that include their candidates of choice in a state or federal primary election.  Roughly estimated, 180,000 of California’s nearly 1 million API voters who are “decline to state” voters may not receive a ballot that allows them to cast a vote in support of their candidates of choice because California’s “closed” primary election process.  In order to cast a ballot in California’s “closed” primary election, “decline to state” voters must request the ballot that includes the name of the candidate(s) that they want to support.  Unfortunately, a large number of API DTS voters do not know that they have the right to request a specific ballot in order to support the candidate of their choice in “closed” primary elections.  As a result, these DTS voters receive a ballot with limited candidate choices and are inadvertently disenfranchised from their full rights as voters.  The non-partisan Asian American Education Institute Voter Education Program is a multifaceted and multilingual public education program designed to educate Asian American DTS voters about their rights to request the ballot of their choice in California’s “closed” primary elections and the process by which they can change their DTS designation through the voter re-registration process.

Asian American Voter Engagement Program.  AAEI was able to successfully launch a campaign to convert thousands of occasional Asian and Pacific Islander American voters in California into Permanent Absentee Voters in order to increase participation in the 2008 election.  The statewide campaign involved 30,000 pieces of direct mail, a targeted door-to-door canvassing campaign, radio advertisements (Cantonese, Korean and Mandarin), web-presence, and in-language print advertisements in major Chinese and Korean dailies.  Imprenta Communications Group headed by Ron Wong conducted the direct mail and Ten Communications headed by Michelle Park developed and coordinated the paid media program.  This pilot project a tremendous success garnering a statewide average targeted voter response rate of over 9%.

Contact

Asian American Education Institute

501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization

Post Office Box 188858

Sacramento, CA 95818