As the 2020 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, several media outlets have sought out the expertise of Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin. News broadcasts on KTLA and Al Jazeera featured Diaz’s analysis of the debate between Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, which she said was really about driving voter turnout since “we have so many barriers at the ballot box, particularly for Black, Latino and Asian American voters.” Diaz told NBC News that neither major party is doing enough to connect with Latino voters, and she weighed in on voter suppression, both overt and indirect, in an Elite Daily article. “Absentee voting and the use of mail-in ballots has now been weaponized by conservatives in the Republican Party to be the new vehicle for ‘voter fraud,’ ” she said, calling this a deliberate attempt to suppress minority voters in the midst of COVID-19.
