Above: Participants listen to a presentation at the New American Voter Initiative Summit held at the University of MD at College Park at August 28.

It’s a story that Maryland’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs Ed Chow likes to tell about his late mother, restaurant owner Ruby Chow. She said she just woke up one morning in 1973 and decided to run for City Council in Seattle. She was up against Walter Hubbard Jr., an African American activist who enjoyed wide support. Yet despite the odds, Ruby Chow emerged victorious, winning with a small margin of 220 votes and becoming the first Asian American elected to Seattle’s City Council.

With a margin that thin, every vote counted, and while he doesn’t know how much of a role Asian American voters played in his mother’s victory, Chow says, “The point is that there were Asian Americans out to vote.”

This is why Chow, along with Clarence Lam and Angela Lagdameo, created the New American Voter Initiative. Its goal is to help more Asian Americans stake their claim in the political arena. In a summit officially launching the movement at the University of Maryland in August, key leaders of the Asian American community gathered to brainstorm ideas on getting more AAPIs to vote. The Summit tackled issues like the Maryland Dream Act, which helps undocumented immigrant students who meet certain criteria to afford in-state tuition. It also held focus group discussions on how communities can collaborate in getting out the word regarding the importance of voting.

Though Asian American immigrants have been recently described in a Pew Research study as surpassing Hispanics as the fastest-growing community, voter turnout has been disappointing in the past. Only 54% of Asian Americans are registered voters, with the study citing citizenship issues as the biggest hurdle. Of these registered voters, only about half voted in 2008.

Chow said he believes many reasons for not voting are cultural. “We have cultural norms and beliefs that affect our voting,” he explained to Asian Fortune. “We have people that may not have strong democratic roots.”

Song Fu, a “Post-Bac” Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, has a similar sentiment. Fu who also attended the summit, said that some people in his parents' generation might not understand how critical it is to participate in elections because they came from Asian countries where the form of government is different.

However, Initiative co-chairman Lam says the problem is also partly the lack of outreach to the AAPI communities, added to language barriers for non-English speaking Asian Americans, and what he called the “restrictive requirements of the registration process”.

For these reasons, the New American Voter Initiative is particularly aimed at community collaboration to reach Asian American citizens.

“We have enlisted ethnically based community organizations to encourage them, gather them, communicate with them, network with them and educate their respective members,” said Chow. “We have to go that extra step to take the time to cultivate a sense of civic duty.”

For example, as a former active member of the Asian American Student Union, Song Fu is prepared to tap into the AAPI groups he is affiliated with, and to create resource packages that outline the registration process or even train others how to register. But young people and ordinary voters can do something as well, he added, saying, “They can simply force themselves to pay more attention. Political information is so easy to obtain nowadays with the overbearing presence of smart phones and tablets…There is a wealth of resources online on voter registration and candidates stances.”

The time is certainly right, as various reports highlight Asian American votes as potentially playing a crucial role this year. A just-released survey by the Lake Research Partners for APIAVote, the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian American Institute cites the ‘untapped potential’ of Asian American votes which could tip this year’s close match between Republicans and Democrats.

National politics aside, Lam believes that voting, for Asian Americans, simply means giving them a voice they need to be able to address issues of the community.

“If we don’t vote, in a way we are not having any say in the decisions made by our elected officials,” said Lam who is currently the Maryland Democratic Party’s Executive Director of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Leadership Council. He believes that with the country divided on two fundamentally contrasting platforms, and “one more cognizant of cultural diversity than the other,” the election results have the potential to affect the state of Asian Americans in the country for years to come. Yet with their emerging voting influence, they could also help make the final call.