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Chinese American Citizens Deserve Full Voting Rights Commentary
reprinted from the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) Boston commentary in the Boston Globe
by Suzanne Lee and Har-Yee Wong
posted 8/28/07
The City of Boston provided a fully translated Chinese bilingual ballot for the first time this spring, and the state is already poised to take it away.
Chinese bilingual ballots, and an increase in bilingual poll workers, were the result of the Department of Justice lawsuit and agreement with the City of Boston that followed in August 2005. But the Secretary of State, which governs statewide election policy, has consistently opposed the inclusion of Chinese transliterated, or phoneticized, names for candidates to the ballot. Now that the City of Boston has set a successful precedent by twice providing a fully translated Chinese bilingual ballot that includes transliterated candidate names, Galvin is opposing both the City of Boston and the Department of Justice in US District Court in an attempt to take away phoneticized candidate names from Chinese-speaking voters.
If we are providing a bilingual ballot to voters, why wouldn’t
we want it to include candidates’ names?
Despite the jocular tone of recent Globe coverage on the issue, the ability
to vote independently and free from interference is a serious matter for
thousands of Chinese-speaking voters in the City of Boston.
Bilingual ballots are necessary because many Chinese-speaking citizens who are other wise able to converse in English may have difficulty reading a complicated ballot. Furthermore, elderly permanent residents who have lived in the US for upwards of 15 or 20 years may have been eligible to pass the US citizenship exam in their native language.
Transliteration, or phoneticization, of candidates’ names is necessary because Chinese is not an alphabetic language. Therefore, candidate names are phoneticized by using Chinese characters, which approximate the sounds of the English name. Chinese language newspapers routinely transliterate names in this manner. In order to produce the ballot in this spring’s special city council election, the City of Boston utilized a dictionary of standard transliterations of candidate names for accuracy and agreement. The names were then sent to each candidate to notify the candidate of the official Chinese transliteration to be used on the ballot and on any campaign literature. The process was straightforward and problem-free.
Not only has the City of Boston successfully transliterated candidate names on the ballot twice this spring, but other localities have been doing so for years, including Alameda County, Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Francisco County, and Santa Clara County in California. New York City has transliterated candidate names in every election for the past 13 years.
For many Chinese-speaking voters, trying to read a ballot without transliterated names is akin to a Boston cab driver navigating the streets of Beijing while trying to read street signs only in Chinese characters.
Deval Patrick, during his tenure at the US Department of Justice, wrote the following opinion about the same issue confronted by New York: “Our analysis shows that a candidate’s name is one of the most important items of information sought by a voter before casting his or her ballot for a particular candidate… For voters who need Chinese-language materials, the transliteration of candidates’ names is important because Roman characters are completely different from Chinese characters.”
Or in the words of Sou Pong Lo, an elderly voter in Chinatown, “I
want to be able to know who the candidates are on the ballot and to vote,
by myself, for the best one who will help the Chinese community. That
is why having a fully bilingual ballot with the names of the candidates
translated is most important.”
The bottom line is that the bilingual ballot is only useful if voters
can read the candidates’ names. To equivocate or make a mockery
of the issue is a slap in the face to the Chinese American community.
Suzanne Lee - principal of the Josiah Quincy School in Chinatown and chairperson of the Chinese Progressive Association. Ann Har-Yee Wong is a member of the City of Boston’s Elections Advisory Committee and translated the candidate names for Boston’s first fully bilingual ballot this spring.
