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IRVING — Ramona Ybon and Jesus Velázquez broke into slow grins after community organizers came knocking. Their large household on Story Road has a less-than-energetic voting record.

No one had paid such attention to their pessimism before.

“They acknowledge we existed,” wisecracked 19-year-old Ybon as she raised her eyebrows.

The organizers scored a signed postcard with a big “I-commit-to-vote” headline, a telephone number and notes on the couple’s biggest concern: jobs.

Latinos are part of a get-out-the-vote effort in Dallas County neighborhoods where turnout of registered voters has lagged in recent major elections.

Groups like the Texas Organizing Project, Proyecto Inmigrante, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the League of Women Voters are targeting Latinos with door-knocking, phone banks, voter-education seminars and offers to drive people to polls.

Enlisting in the cause, even, are a few Catholic pastors, powerful but often politically reticent messengers.

“Voting is a moral obligation,” said the Rev. Domingo Romero of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Dallas. The tough-talking pastor plans voting pitches to be made while he has a captive audience at Mass.

Danny Cendejas has spent the last year working with the Texas Organizing Project. He and Joe Herrera canvassed neighborhoods in Irving and Dallas looking for registered voters whose actual voting was spotty, according to county records.

“Our voices and views are going to be heard, if we vote,” said Candejas, in his first job since graduating from college.

Often, the bilingual pair are met by surprise. At the Estrada home, the pair were invited into the living room to speak to the family patriarch, Anastacio Estrada, an 81-year-old in a wheelchair because of his diabetes. “Cuidado de salud,” health care, is his top issue, he told the organizers.

“Why does he need to vote?” asked his son, who’s named after his father. Herrera glided into a practiced rap about how politicians listened to those who voted. Cendejas rattled off the locations of nearby early voting venues.

Same issues

But the question — why vote? — is a profound one that’s long troubled those trying to motivate disillusioned voters. To Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, people with such views are “the great unengaged.”

Vargas has repeatedly said activating Latino registered voters is like activating any other voter. Jobs, education and health care are top issues — as they are in all communities.

Immigration ranks fifth in importance, according to a survey released this month by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. Education, jobs and the economy nearly tied as top concerns with more than half calling them “extremely important.”

Vargas’ organization projects 12.2 million Latinos will vote nationwide in the Nov. 6 presidential election. A record 9.7 million Latinos voted in 2008.

In Texas, Latinos represent 26 percent of registered voters.

In 2008, 50 percent of eligible Latino voters cast ballots, compared with 65 percent of blacks and 66 percent of whites, says the Pew Hispanic Center. The Latino population is younger overall, and in general, young people vote less frequently than older people.

Apathy and pessimism worry Douglas Interiano, a lawyer who runs the social service agency Proyecto Inmigrante with offices in Fort Worth and Dallas. Interiano, the son of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants, said immigrants have told him, “In the homeland, when they vote things just stay the same.”

Interiano’s response: “We are assimilating into the U.S., and part of that means voting.”

Aware of apathy

Jocelyn Alvarado, 20, looked a little stunned when organizers knocked on the door of her family’s white frame house.

She’s the president of the student government association at North Lake College. Yes, she’s aware of apathy and the fact that her neighborhood doesn’t get voting rates much over 20 percent. Her top issue: the middle class and her place in it, she said.

Elizabeth Walley, a volunteer with the League of Women Voters, calls the get-out-the-vote effort far more difficult than simply registering voters. Political parties and candidates mount aggressive campaigns at election time, but “typical campaigns target likely voters and that leaves out those who aren’t engaged,” Walley said.

Vargas agreed, saying “if you vote in every election, you are going to get bombarded” with campaign information. And freshly minted citizens are low-hanging fruit, easier to harvest for voting.

Getting hard-to-budge voters to polls requires education, Walley said. That’s why the league started “Latina empowerment” seminars this year with funding from a grant by the Dallas Women’s Foundation.

Some seminars have drawn more than 100 participants. Education covers basics like polling venues to how a tax dollar works on potholes and schools, Walley said. It also covers the historic fight to get voting rights, Walley said.

The voter campaigns come with controversy. Some of Texas Organizing Project’s leadership in Texas formerly worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, an organization that dissolved in 2010 after a string of controversies, including fraudulent voter registration efforts. The Dallas chapter wasn’t linked to the problems.

Such issues don’t come up at the doorsteps, but apathy does. “Most [Latino voters] are like us and think they don’t like either candidate so they don’t vote,” Ybon said.

But then Ybon gives a detailed critique on the incumbent, ranging from the Iraq war to work permits for young people who are in the U.S. unlawfully.

Velázquez added, “This year, I wasn’t thinking of voting. But now that he told me our voice matters … ”

Ybon chimed in: “You committed. Now you have to vote.”

TEXAS VOTER CHARACTERISTICS

Eligible white voters outnumber eligible Hispanic voters by more than 2 to 1.

Eligible Hispanic voters outnumber eligible black voters by about 2 to 1 and eligible Asian voters by about 9 to 1.

About 9 in 10 of eligible Hispanic voters in Texas are of Mexican origin, compared with 6 of 10 nationwide.

About 83 percent of eligible Hispanic voters are native-born, but only 23 percent of eligible Asian voters are.

SOURCE: Pew Hispanic Center tabulations of the 2010 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau