House OKs Bill on Multilingual Ballot Material

Acting on a measure with major implications for Orange County and the rest of Southern California, the House approved a bill Friday that would require county governments to provide voter materials and ballots in more foreign languages.

Leading the opposition was Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who attacked both bilingual ballots and bilingual education as “nonsense (that) is leading to linguistic segregation.”

The legislation, approved by a 237-135 vote with support from President Bush, would require counties to supply non-English versions of voter information and ballots for Hispanic, Asian-American, American Indian and native Alaskan minority groups of 10,000 or more, provided they have limited proficiency in English and a literacy rate lower than the U.S. average.

Under the new law, Orange County would be required to offer ballots written in Spanish and Vietnamese, as well as English.

The bill also would extend the language aid provision of the Voting Rights Act for 15 years beyond its scheduled expiration next month. The measure was sent to the Senate where its election-year prospects were regarded as good.

Rohrabacher and other opponents of the bill argued that voters should learn English if they are to assimilate into American society.

“Today we’re talking about something that does go to the heart and soul of America. It goes to our unity as a people,” Rohrabacher said.

“How tragic it is that through bilingual ballots and bilingual education, we are encouraging large numbers of our own people to freeze themselves out of the social and economic mainstream,” he added. “It will destroy the America I love. . . . Reject bilingualism.”

However, it was Rohrabacher’s amendment that the House rejected. By a vote of 115 to 253, members turned back Rohrabacher’s attempt to eliminate the 10,000 minority population threshold from the bill.

Supporters of the measure contended that the bill would extend the franchise to millions of Latinos, Asian-Americans, American Indians and Alaska natives who now face a language barrier at the polls.

“It’s a breakthrough,” said Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente). “It’s an important signal to people not proficient in English that their government encourages their participation in the political process.”

The Bush Administration supported the 15-year extension of the Voting Rights Act provisions but argued that the threshold should be 20,000 foreign-language citizens, rather than 10,000.

Under the current federal law, bilingual assistance is required only if more than 5% of the voting age citizens share a single foreign language, their literacy rate is lower than the national average and the Census Bureau finds that they have limited proficiency in English. Friday’s debate was not the first time that Rohrabacher has become embroiled in a controversy involving ethnic minorities. During his successful primary election campaign this spring, the two-term congressman strongly criticized illegal immigrants, at one point referring to them generically as “Pedro.” The reference unleashed a torrent of criticism from Latino organizations.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that local jurisdictions newly affected by the bilingual ballot legislation would have to spend about $5 million to $10 million more per year.

“The biggest single burden would fall on Los Angeles County, which would be required to provide information in six languages,” the CBO analysis said.

Under the bill, Los Angeles County would be required to supply ballots and voter materials in four languages in addition to the English and Spanish versions it now provides. Citizens would be offered ballots in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog, the language spoken by Filipinos.

San Diego county would have to add Spanish-language voting material.

Since Los Angeles county’s current voting equipment does not have the capacity for six-language voting, the congressional report said, officials would have to devise alternative methods to meet the bill’s requirements if it became law.

Koreans, who number more than 10,000 in the Los Angeles area, would not be covered by the provision because their literacy rate is higher than the national average, according to the Census Bureau.

California also has 10 counties that are required by federal law, because of their Latino populations, to provide bilingual ballot materials. San Francisco also offers voter material in Chinese. Every ballot pamphlet mailed to voters in those counties includes a post card that can be mailed back to request ballot materials in another language.

Orange County is not among the counties required to provide bilingual ballot materials.

Advocates of the federal bill said the existing 5% standard excluded large numbers of citizens in large urban areas who spoke a foreign language and had limited ability to read or understand English.

Experience in the Southwestern United States, proponents said, showed that registration and voting by Latinos doubled from 1976 to 1988 after local governments provided ballots and other materials in Spanish. The new 10,000-person threshold would give most Asian-American and Puerto Rican communities the same kind of assistance, according to supporters of the bill.

But opponents contended that there was no showing of discrimination at the ballot box to justify continued federal intervention in local voting decisions. In addition, foes of the bill said bilingual ballots tend to give an official seal of approval to other languages as coequal to English and discouraged assimilation of minority groups.

“Foreign language ballots are crutches which keep people from learning our language,” said Rep. Wally Herger (R-Rio Oso).

But Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who represents a Cuban-American constituency, strongly disagreed.

“I can speak from personal experience that bilingual ballots have been a major factor in opening the doors to many minority voters in South Florida,” she said.

The House defeated several attempts to narrow the scope of the bill. A proposal by Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Seres) to require the federal government to pay for the cost of the bilingual ballots almost passed, losing 186 to 184.

Staff writers Robert Stewart in Washington and Virginia Ellis in Sacramento contributed to this story.