A larger swath of the country will have access to translated ballots this year than in any prior presidential election.
Under federal Voting Rights Act requirements, 331 voting areas in 30 states must provide language access to more than 24 million voters with limited English proficiency. That’s a 26% increase in voting areas under the mandate since the 2020 election, driven by a variety of factors, including people turning 18 or moving.
However, voter rights activists say the newest numbers, based on U.S. Census Bureau data, represent an undercount. Frederick Vélez III Burgos, the national director of civic engagement at the Hispanic Federation, said that’s been well documented in places like New York, especially for Latinos.
When data determines language access at the polls and the underlying numbers have been undercounted, that’s a problem, Vélez said.
Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act has several requirements that a voting jurisdiction, often a city or county, have to meet. For instance, they must translate ballots and other voting information if more than 10,000 people or 5% of the voting-age citizens who speak that other language have low literacy rates and don’t speak English well. Asian, Spanish, Native American and Alaska Native languages are covered by the law, which focuses on “those language minorities that have suffered a history of exclusion from the political process,” the U.S. Department of Justice says.
Forty-seven of the voting areas newly covered by the mandate since the last presidential election are in a single state: Wisconsin. Most of those jurisdictions will need to provide translated materials in languages spoken by members of Native American tribes there.
Three states and 102 voting areas are on the cusp of being federally required to provide translated elections materials but didn’t quite make it for 2024, according to an analysis of recent census data conducted by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an advocacy organization.
People who speak Spanish, the most common language used in U.S. homes besides English, are disproportionately impacted. That’s the language at issue for 77 of the 102 areas that are close to being required to provide translated voting materials. New York, New Jersey and New Mexico, meanwhile, just missed hitting the federal requirement to translate voting documents into Spanish statewide.
“People think that voter suppression is just placing obstacles that you can see or laws that make it more difficult, but not having information in your language is a form of voter suppression,” Vélez said.
In some states, people are pressing voting officials to act before the federal government mandates it — or to add more languages eligible for translation.
“What we’ve found in New Jersey especially is that a lot of the languages that have very growing pockets of populations, such as Arabic speakers, we have a lot of folks who speak languages from the African diaspora, and those aren’t necessarily protected under the federal VRA,” said Nuzhat Chowdhury, a senior counsel at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “One thing that we have been advocating for, and there’s a growing movement for this among states, is to enact state voting rights acts that can then extend the bucket of languages that are protected within the state.”
While Fairfax County in Virginia just missed the federal requirement to translate elections material into Korean this year, the county has done so for the past seven years due to its steadily increasing Korean population.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, meanwhile, had been required to provide election materials in Spanish for several years, starting in 2010 in certain precincts, under a Voting Rights Act mandate to protect the rights of residents who moved to the state from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where Spanish is the most spoken language. This is the first year the county is again required to provide those translations, but Cuyahoga never stopped supplying bilingual ballots.
The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections says it also has staff specializing in outreach to Spanish-speaking voters and bilingual poll workers at voting locations with a high number of people with Hispanic surnames.
Kayla Griffin, Ohio’s director of All Voting is Local, said classification itself poses a language access barrier. The Midwest’s large Latino, Middle Eastern and North African population are oftentimes categorized as white in census data, as opposed to differentiating which country immigrants are from and what languages they speak.
“It is hard to ascertain who we have in our communities to get a good clean handle on what our language access should look like,” she said.
This presidential election will be the first nationwide in which the Hmong language appears on a ballot under the Voting Rights Act mandate. That’s happening in Ramsey County, Minnesota, where translated ballots were first offered in 2022. However, voters in some California counties received ballots in Hmong as early as 2018 under that state’s voting-access law, which sets a lower threshold than the federal mandate.
The Minnesota Secretary of State provides election information on its website in several languages, including Hmong, translated by a local company.
Since Hmong is usually passed down orally through generations, with many dialects, it’s important for local election officials to work with the community to ensure translations account for the dialect used there, said Cassondra Knudson, a communications director at the Office of the Secretary of State.
“That’s why it’s really important for our local elections officials to have good relationships with their community, and be open to the community coming in to serve the community themselves,” Knudson said. “And that’s why local elections are amazing, because they’re run by your friends and family and neighbors.”
Too often, voting rights organizations say, translations aren’t adequate. This is a job that requires people with language expertise, they say, but some voting officials lean on Google Translate instead.
Bob Sakaniwa, director of policy and advocacy at Asian & Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote), said one example of a poorly translated elections website turned “primary election” into an election involving elementary school.
“Technicalities of the language itself requires some finesse in translation,” he said, “and to simply use Google Translate doesn’t cut it.”
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division put it this way in a write-up about the law: “Local officials should reach out to the local minority community to help produce or check translations.” The documents, the office emphasized, must be provided in a way “that local voters actually can use.”
Anytime there’s a brand new-jurisdiction added to the language access mandate, there’s usually some growing pains, Sakaniwa said.
“The key to all these expanded jurisdictions where additional languages have to be covered: The local election officials have to actually carry out these mandates,” he said.