‘‘This is an historic moment for the immigrant community,” said Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa of Maryland Inc., an organization that advocates for immigrant workers’ rights. ‘‘We are going to choose the right people to represent our community, people who look like us.”
With minorities now comprising more than two-fifths of the population in Montgomery County, local advocacy groups want to make this election season one in which government representation reflects the current demographic trends.

‘‘This is an historic moment for the immigrant community,” said Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa of Maryland Inc., an organization that advocates for immigrant workers’ rights. ‘‘We are going to choose the right people to represent our community, people who look like us.”

Torres was speaking Monday at the Smithville Colored School, now a museum in Silver Spring, where 21 organizations representing various minority groups signed a pledge to try to sign up all unregistered voters in the county by the Aug. 22 deadline for the Sept. 12 primaries and to continue voter outreach and empowerment efforts thereafter.

‘‘Watch out,” Henry Hailstock warned would-be legislators. ‘‘You better come up with the issues we care about.”

Hailstock, president of the Montgomery County Chapter of the NAACP, called the upcoming election ‘‘critical” to all minority groups. ‘‘We can be a formidable force to make an impact in this community, this country, this state,” he said.

Non-white residents made up 42.7 percent of the population in Montgomery County in 2004, nearly 8 percent higher than the percentage of minorities in the entire state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By contrast, the 56.6 percent of non-Hispanic white residents in the county was almost 6 percent less than the percentage of non-Hispanic whites statewide.

At Monday’s rally, Torres said the number of unregistered minority voters statewide was 277,000, but there is no reliable way to count unregistered voters, let alone unregistered minority voters, according to Gilberto Zelaya of the Montgomery County Board of Elections.

As of July 31, however, there are 502,422 registered voters in the county, Zelaya said.

The pledge signed by the organizations Monday calls for voter registration as the starting point in a movement for affordable housing and health care, quality education and economic development for all.

The push among minority groups for increased representation in the voting booth coincides with politicians of all ideologies paying more attention to minority constituents, said Nicholas Rathod of the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington, D.C. ‘‘People are seeing more and more how important these votes are to candidates,” he said.

Rathod, senior manager of state and regional affairs, called President Bush’s courting of the Latino vote in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections a ‘‘watershed” moment, combined with the population growth of the Latino and black communities.

But whether population increases will translate into votes remains to be seen, said pollster Keith Haller, president of Potomac Inc. ‘‘It takes a long time of maturation to create a political force,” said Haller, noting that the recent election of minority candidates in Southern California happened after 10 to 20 years of grassroots organization.

In Montgomery County specifically, primary voters tend to be 55 years of age and older and longtime voters, Haller said, not the younger potential voters being targeted by the minority advocates. ‘‘The hardest thing in the world is to get people registered,” he said.

Carmen Larsen, secretary of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Montgomery County, signed the pledge Monday, emphasizing the privileges gained once someone votes. ‘‘If you can vote, you can go over and talk to your representatives about what is going on in your community,” she said.

Equally as important to Larsen is the accompanying economic empowerment. An owner of a small business in Chevy Chase, Larsen has worked with the U.S. House Small Business Committee since 1998 and seen the problems small, minority-owned businesses face in procuring government bids. ‘‘If we can get minority small businesses at the table, we can have more of a say,” she said. ‘‘We need more proactive outreach for the entire community. The minority community is just underrepresented.”

Rathod said the influence of minority communities will be evident in exit polling on election days as well in the types of initiatives on future ballots and issues candidates are debating.

‘‘They are not going to go away,” Rathod said of minority groups as voting blocs. ‘‘Candidates need to consider and address their concerns. They can no longer be taken for granted.”

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