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On the north end of town, where the Anglos live, people lined up in large numbers Saturday at the Roswell Mall to take advantage of the early voting site there. But down on the south side, in the Hispanic neighborhood, the designated early voting venue was locked up tight -- closed for the weekend. For community activist Bonnie Aria, that distinction says all you need to know about voting rights here in southern New Mexico, a rugged expanse of arid desert country that could play a key role in the 2004 election. "Of course it's deliberate," Aria said. "Up where the Republicans live, they make it as easy as possible for anybody to vote. But in our part of town, the polling place is closed on the one day when working people could go vote. They're sending us a clear message: We're locked out." In a mass mailing, the Republican National Committee is citing Hispanic voter registration campaigns here as proof that "Democrats . . . will cheat in order to win." Hispanic advocates argue that the largely Republican power structure is trying "to discourage a disenfranchised community from voting," in the words of Stephen Arellano, of Citizens Against Un-American Voter Intimidation. The Hispanic community is the nation's fastest-growing minority group. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Hispanic voters could have a crucial impact this year in several battleground states: Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. Traditionally, the Hispanic vote has been mainly Democratic, and Democrats have launched major efforts to register new voters in Hispanic neighborhoods. New Mexico's Hispanic governor, Democrat Bill Richardson, says his group, Moving America Forward, has registered 30,000 Hispanics in the state this year. [more

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