 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
Boston Asian American Voters Win Bilingual Ballots
by Lydia Lowe
Chinese Progressive Association
October, 2005
The poll worker who was giving instructions walked up to me as I was heading toward the voting booth with my ballot. I had not asked for assistance. This poll worker followed me to the voting booth, saying to me, "Vote for numbers 6 and 10" for city council. As I marked my ballot for the city council contest, the poll worker was looking over my shoulder. . .If the ballot were available in Chinese, voters could vote for the candidates they want without needing help from the poll workers, who sometimes try to influence the voters.
Incidents like the one above, described by an elderly Chinatown voter, led to a major outcry about voter coercion and polling irregularities in 2003, then a federal investigation and a lawsuit brought this year by the US Department of Justice against the City of Boston for violations of voting rights.
Over two years later, Chinese and Vietnamese voters will gain bilingual ballots, written election information, and a dramatic increase in bilingual election workers in dozens of precincts across the city. After seven weeks of a stormy public stand-off between the Justice Department and Boston mayor Thomas Menino, the initial agreement was finalized by the court on October 18.
"It's a case with national impact," said Glenn D. Magpantay, a staff attorney at the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "This is the first time fully-translated Chinese language ballots have been mandated by a court order. It is also only the third case ever filed under the nondiscrimination provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act concerning Asian Americans."
Most of the voting rights agreement goes into effect on November 8, 2005 as Boston goes to the polls to pick the mayor and city council, an election which also includes Boston's first Asian American candidate for citywide office. Chinese bilingual election workers will be required at 45 polling stations across the city and Vietnamese bilingual workers at 26 locations. Whereas nine Chinese bilingual poll workers were hired in 2004, the goal for this November's election is a total of 69 Chinese bilingual poll workers!
A bilingual Chinese and Vietnamese sample ballot will be posted inside voting booths for this November's election, with full use of bilingual ballots scheduled for 2006.
A Nationwide Precedent
The Boston agreement represents the first time in the nation that Chinese American voters have gained bilingual ballots when they were not mandated by population count. Under the guidelines of the Voting Rights Act, more than 10,000 of the city's citizens must be limited English proficient, of the same language-minority group, of voting age, and with a higher than average illiteracy rate in order to trigger the bilingual ballot requirement.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on July 29, 2005, charging that the City of Boston had failed to provide Spanish-speaking voters equal political access and that circumstances facing Chinese and Vietnamese-speaking voters prevented them from fully exercising their voting rights.
Although Mayor Menino first claimed that the charges had no basis and vowed to fight the lawsuit, the City of Boston eventually agreed to all remedies proposed by the Justice Department.
Next > Community Involvement Was Key
1 2
