Quen Huang, 65, wanted to vote today because he wants to protect Social Security.

Julissa Bisono, 20, wanted to vote today because she is angry about long waits and high fees for people who want to become U.S. citizens.

On the surface, Huang, formerly a peasant farmer in Guangdong, China and Bisono, a child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, have little in common. But immigrant rights groups in New York City have banded together to get out the vote among new immigrant voters like Huang and Bisono and to combat problems on Election Day.

The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), a nonprofit umbrella organization that works with about 150 immigrant-rights groups throughout the city, has registered 225,000 new immigrant voters in the last five years, most since the 2000 election. The push came as a response to the tightening of immigration laws of 1996 that made it harder for immigrants to become legal voters, said John Bingham, NYIC’s director of Capital Projects and Law.

After registering new Americans to vote, immigrant groups conducted voter education to make sure those who registered actually get the chance to vote and that lack of interpreters, incomplete polling lists and the new requirement for some new voters to present identification did not discourage people.

“Everyone’s anticipating problems,” said Rupa Parekh, the national board chair for the South Asian American Voting Youth, at a voter education program held in Jackson Heights, Queens on Saturday. “There’s too much at stake for people to go home because they are given misinformation.”

Despite Parekh’s worries, some polls in Queens were stocked with interpreters. P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights and Newtown High School in Elmhurst each had eight interpreters to help Korean, Chinese, South Asian and Hispanic voters.

Michael Kassner, a volunteer for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) at P.S. 69, said that some potential voters left not because they were intimidated, but because lines were too long or they had gone to the wrong polling site.

Parekh was one of 350 volunteers with AALDEF who monitored polling sites with a high percentage of immigrant voters, mainly in Brooklyn, Queens and in Chinatown in Manhattan. By mid-day Tuesday, Parekh said there had been no major problems at the polls.

Safeguarding new voter rights comes during an election when about 60,000 immigrants in New York State who applied to be American citizens will not be able to vote because of processing backlogs in the federal Department of Homeland Security, according to a study by the NYIC.

“Many, many people are unable to vote because of the backlogs of citizenship,” said Vladimir Ephsteyn, the president of the Russian American Voters Educational League. “I think we will lose thousands and thousands of new votes because of this.”

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the arm of the Department of Homeland Security that deals with citizenship and naturalization issues, has had a backlog of applications for years, and the department has the goal of addressing it by 2006, said spokesman Shawn Saucier.

“The bottom line is we can’t just wave a magic wand and fix this,” Saucier said.

The fact that many immigrants won’t be able to vote gives a sense of urgency to protect the voting rights of those who have voting status and get them out to the polls, Ephsteyn said.

Often, new immigrants do not vote because they feel disconnected and think politicians won’t make positive changes to their communities, said John Mollenkopf, the director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, who has studied immigrant voting.

“People are very busy surviving and getting ahead,” Mollenkopf said. “Politics are not relevant to that situation.”

To empower those citizens, a connection needs to be made between immigrants’ daily lives and who is in power, said Ana Maria Archila, the executive director of the Latin American Integration Center.

“Challenges in peoples’ lives are very serious,” she said. “We need to connect experience in peoples’ lives with need for political participation and their engagement.”

Like the other immigrant organizers, Eddie Chiu, president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), said the most important issues for his community are education and the economy.

“We’ve got no power. We get ignored,” he said. “I keep telling the old immigrants, ‘We’re voting for the next generation.’”

Chiu spoke from his office at the CCBA headquarters on Mott Street, turned for the day into a voter assistance center. Over the sidewalk entrance a banner declared, “Vote = Power.” Inside, volunteers explained to new Chinese-American voters the intricacies of New York’s voting machines and registration cards.

“When you go in to vote for the first time, finding your election district, walking in and knowing what to expect can be a little intimidating,” said Brian Pu-Folkes, the executive director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a nonprofit immigrant rights organization, at a voter education event in Jackson Heights on Saturday. “We hope that what can be a scary process is made easier.”

Arnie Zambrano, 23, was one of four paid interpreters at the polling site at Renaissance High School in Jackson Heights on Tuesday, and he saw the trepidations of new voters.

“First time voters are excited, but scared in a way,” said Zambrano who speaks Spanish, French and Italian. “I try to guide them through the process. If I make it a good experience, they’ll come back and vote again.”

Immigrant-rights groups hope that new voters in this election will continue to vote, taking interest not only in national elections, but also in city and state elections.

“You are voting not only as an individual, not only as an ethnic group, but as a group of people that have shared interest,” Archila told the diverse group of Latino, Chinese and Korean voters at the Jackson Heights event. “This is what New York City looks like and this is what should be represented.”