Lousy Local Conditions IV

LANGUAGE MINORITY VOTERS

One of the most serious though under-reported problems with the American election system is the lack of accessibility to the polls for language minority voters. It is difficult to quantify the number of minority language voters who are wrongfully and often illegally disenfranchised because required measures are not taken to assist them in voting. However, there was plenty of anecdotal evidence of such disenfranchisement in the 2000 election. For example, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that several thousand Spanish speaking voters were disenfranchised in Florida, as well as a large number of French-speaking Haitian voters. The commission reported, “Many poll workers were not properly trained to handle language assistance issues. Some voters found that even when volunteers were available to provide assistance, the volunteers or precinct workers were prevented from providing language assistance. In some instances, bilingual poll workers were directed to not provide language assistance to voters who were in need of that assistance.” As the two most diverse cities in the country, Los Angeles and New York City both face enormous challenges with respect to language minority voters: each has more minority voters than the states of New Jersey and Virginia combined.

Congressman Xavier Becerra testified before a Senate committee that fourteen poll sites in Los Angeles did not display or make available bilingual materials provided to them. At the same time, Los Angeles does a great deal to prepare for the complexities involved in administering an election that requires it to provide voting materials in seven different languages. The city works directly with the communities and ensures there are sufficient bilingual poll workers and translators at voting sites. The ongoing challenges Los Angeles faces are cultural ones—helping new immigrants understand the system politically and administratively. As a result, this and other similarly situated jurisdictions must focus their voter education efforts particularly on new immigrant voters. In addition, Los Angeles was hindered by its use of punch card ballots, which cannot provide ballot choices in a large number of languages as easily as other technologies. . . .

Not only are many poll workers unprepared to provide adequate services to language minority voters, particularly Asian Americans, but New York City also continues to experience a dearth of bilingual workers at the polls, despite increased efforts at recruitment. In 2001, the city was short 122 Chinese interpreters out of a total of 483 positions, 256 Spanish interpreters out of a total of 779 positions, and 19 Korean interpreters out of a total of 32 positions. New Jersey encountered a similar problem in 2001. In one county that must provide materials in Spanish, instructions in Spanish on the absentee ballots were reversed, so that voters were told to place their mark below (abajo) their preferred candidate rather than the correct way, above (sobre). Many of those ballots were counted when the votes were tallied, thus potentially distorting the result.

(Ronald Hayduk, The 2001 Elections in New York City [pdf 348 KB]. A Century Foundation Report for The National Commission on Federal Election Reform. xvi-xviii.)