Foreign-language ballots could lose legal underpinning

When King County began offering ballots and voter pamphlets in Chinese four years ago, it was as though someone switched a light on for Qiu Feng Pang.

Suddenly, confusing ballot initiatives made sense to the 74-year-old retiree, who emigrated from China in 1989 and became a U.S. citizen seven years later.

She no longer needed to copy the "answers" of friends or family onto the mail-in ballot she received at her home in Seattle's Chinatown International District.

Now, she said, she can understand the context of ballot measures and the political positions of candidates: "I vote what I want after deep consideration."

But the section of the federal Voting Rights Act that required King County to provide ballots in Chinese, and three other Washington counties to offer them in Spanish, will expire next year.

Unless Congress votes to reauthorize it, in a bill now being drafted, some worry that many like Pang will be left without a voice in one the most basic guarantees of U.S. citizenship.

"A lot of immigrants are intimidated by the voting process," said George Cheung, of the statewide advocacy group Raising Our Asian Pacific American Representation — ROAR.

"A lot of them get very confused, particularly around our hard-to-understand ballot initiatives, which are sometimes hard enough for English speakers to understand. So they either make uninformed decisions or they skip questions altogether."

Federal requirement

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed barriers to voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, faced by blacks and other minorities in the Jim Crow South.

The law required monitors to be stationed at polling places, and for states with a history of voting abuses to get federal approval before changing their election procedures. To appease states'-rights advocates, federal officials at the time placed an expiration date on those provisions.

In 1975, Congress added Section 203, also with an expiration date. That section required local jurisdictions to offer language assistance to American Indians, Alaskan Natives and Asian and Latino Americans.

The law applies when eligible voters in those groups number 10,000, or more than 5 percent, of a county's voting pool.

In 2002, based on newly released census data, the Department of Justice notified King County it would need to provide such assistance in Chinese, while Yakima, Adams and Franklin counties in Eastern Washington were required to offer it in Spanish. They are among 466 local governments in 31 states required to provide language assistance.

The three Eastern Washington counties use mail-in ballots exclusively, almost all of them printed in both Spanish and English, officials there say.

In King County, about 1,500 Chinese-language ballots were either mailed to voters or used at polling sites last November, spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said. The county has access to a pool of 168 Chinese poll workers it can assign to 107 polling places where voters need assistance, she said.

Need questioned

But here in Washington as well as in Congress, some lawmakers question the continued need for such assistance.

Some have said citizens should be fluent enough in English to function, including to vote, and that language assistance removes any incentive for them to master English.

And county officials say that sentiment is shared by many angry voters who call to complain about the bilingual or foreign-language voting material they sometimes receive in the mail.

"We let them know that we are bound by law to provide this assistance," said Heidi Hunt, elections administrator in Adams County. "I believe it's important that all our citizens be able to cast ballots based on a true understanding of the issues."

At the Sunshine Garden Chinese Senior Day Care Center in the Chinatown International District where Pang spends some of her days, participants struggled with the English-only pamphlets and ballots before King County began offering them in Chinese.

"They wanted to vote but didn't understand well enough to make an informed decision," lead worker Andes Kong said.

For Chinese immigrants, especially older ones, voting based on their personal choice and their own opinion is still a difficult concept. "Here in America they can vote according to their preference." Kong said.

Renewal favored

The American Civil Liberties Union recently launched a nationwide campaign calling on Congress to renew key sections of the voting act.

Otherwise, "I see no reason why counties would continue to offer this assistance — out of the goodness of their hearts?" said Jennifer Shaw, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. "I don't see other counties that aren't required to do it, doing it."

In the legislative session that ended last week, ACLU Washington, Cheung's group and other advocates pushed for legislation to enshrine the federal provision in state law. The measure did not make it out of the Legislature.

Next, Cheung said his group may begin collecting signatures for an initiative to the Legislature next year. Even some people born in this country don't speak English as a first language, he said.

"But they play by the rules and pay their taxes. In a representative democracy they have a right to be participating and doing so in an informed way."

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com