¡Vota! Bilingual Ballots are the Next Step for Voting Rights
Since it was enacted in 1965, the Voting Rights Act has formed the backbone of voting rights in the United States. In the last five and a half decades, the law has been significantly altered by legislative amendment and court cases. Some of these changes, like the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, eliminated key protections for voters. Other changes to the VRA, though, have expanded the act to protect the rights of new minority voters not originally covered by the legislation.
Section 203, which requires certain jurisdictions to provide voting material in languages other than English, is one of the rights enhancing additions to the VRA. It applies to communities with more than 10,000 total voting age citizens or when over five percent of all voting age citizens “are members of a single language minority group.” Covered language groups include Spanish, Asian, Native American, and Alaskan Native, and determinations about the number of citizens in an area who fall in these categories is done by the Census Bureau. In Colorado, currently Conejos, Costilla, Denver, and Saguache counties are required to offer voting material in Spanish and English and La Plata and Montezuma counties must offer election materials printed in Ute. Election materials includes not just ballots, but also voter registration forms, polling place notices, voter instructions, and voter information pamphlets.
Though Section 203 has made it easier for countless voters to cast their ballots, the VRA’s shortcomings still leave an untold number of Coloradans, and voters across the country, unable to effectively participate in an election because of language barriers. Due to the use of population level demographic data to determine which jurisdictions must provide bilingual ballots, most counties continue to offer voting materials exclusively in English, depriving minority language citizens the opportunity to easily register to vote and cast their ballots.
The census data sometimes produces illogical results. Between 2016 and 2018, Rio Grande county fell out of Section 203 coverage for Spanish not because of a mass exodus of minority-language citizens, but because of an increase in the English-speaking population, which pushed the proportion of Spanish speakers in the county below the five percent threshold. Census Bureau data didn’t indicate that the total number of non-fluent English citizens had declined — in fact, it likely had increased, albeit, at a slower pace than the English speaking population. Additionally, in 2016, La Plata County expected to be required to provide bilingual Spanish-English election material. Instead, it was ordered to provide Ute-English voting materials, though tribal elders estimate that there are less than twenty-five tribal members fluent in Ute in the entire county “and they also speak English.” In 2011, twenty Colorado counties anticipated being required by the VRA to provide Spanish language voting materials due to growing Latino populations. Instead, only three were found to be covered by Section 203.
While Colorado statute provides that a voter who has “difficulties with the English language” may receive assistance with voting from “any person” the voter selects, this provision hardly goes far enough to ensure all citizens are able to effectively and comfortably cast a ballot. While unquestionably better than nothing (or, worse, a law forbidding assistance) this statute still requires a voter to “declare” to an election official his or her inability to understand English and the assistor must complete a form before assisting. For some voters, concerns over harassment or the embarrassment of declaring that they cannot speak English likely keeps them from going to the polls at all. The opportunity for in-home assistance with a mail-in ballot mitigates some of these concerns, but a non-English speaker may still inadvertently discard their English-language ballot or feel uncomfortable revealing their preferences to an assistor.
It would obviously be impossible to require every Colorado ballot to be printed in every language. Nonetheless, almost 600,000 Coloradans, or 11.9% of the state’s population, live in homes where Spanish is the primary language spoken. Our state has the tenth highest percentage of Spanish speaking households in the nation. Spanish speakers have a significant, and growing, presence in Colorado, as well as across the United States. The time has come for every county to print election materials in both English and Spanish. Section 203 of the VRA will provide an adequate measure to protect other minority-language groups, such as the Ute People of southwestern Colorado, who will still be able to receive a ballot in their native tongue under the federal rules. Clerks must do everything possible to outreach to other, smaller, minority language communities within their counties to ensure voting is accessible to non-English fluent citizens.
Though election officials regularly complain about the expense of providing bilingual voting materials, few jurisdictions under Section 203 coverage have actually bothered to keep track of the costs associated with compliance. Those that have found the expenses to be “cost-effective” and only accounted for a “small portion of total election expenses.” In a 1984 study, the average cost to communities for providing bilingual voting materials was 7.6% of all election expenditure. In 1996, it was 4.9%. In 2006, Los Angeles County, “which has the highest number of language minority voters in the greatest number of languages” considered the cost of translating voting materials to be “reasonable” and comparable to the minority-language percentage of the population. That same year, the New Mexico Secretary of State described the costs associated with Section 203 compliance as “really minimal.” Further, the cost of providing bilingual voter material decreased over time as translated instructions and templates can be reused in future elections.
As Colorado, and the nation as a whole, becomes increasingly linguistically diverse, the time has come for our ballots to catch up. Bilingual English-Spanish voting materials are a critical starting point to ensure that all voters are able to effectively, and independently, exercise their right to vote without fear of prejudice or harassment.
Nicholas Monck served as the Deputy Director for Voter Protection for the Colorado Democratic Party in 2018 and Boulder County Democratic Party Legal Team Co-Lead from 2017–2019. Opinions expressed are his own and do not represent the views of his employer.
