3 Cities Agree to Mend Election Process

Three Southern California cities have agreed to change their election procedures after the U.S. Justice Department accused them of failing to provide all voting materials in foreign languages during the March elections, officials said Friday.

The settlements come after the Justice Department’s civil rights division completed audits of how elections were handled in Azusa, Paramount and Rosemead, three small but ethnically diverse communities.

The Justice Department alleged that Azusa and Paramount failed to fully translate election materials into Spanish, as they are required to do under the federal Voting Rights Act. Authorities said Rosemead failed to offer all voting materials in Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese.

The accusations come in the midst of a Justice Department crackdown on local governments’ compliance with the foreign-language rule of the Voting Rights Act. The civil rights division has brought as many lawsuits to enforce the rule since 2002 as it had brought in the preceding 20 years combined, the department said.

Federal authorities made the allegations after they sent monitors to polling places on election day. The government did not cite examples of voters not being able to cast ballots because of the problems, but said in court papers the violations had the potential to disenfranchise some people by robbing them of “information necessary for their political participation.”

The Voting Rights Act requires any jurisdiction that has a substantial number of people who speak other languages to provide all voting materials in the other language in addition to English.

City officials acknowledged problems in their voting procedures, but defended their election process and criticized the Justice Department for threatening a lawsuit instead of warning them about the violations and allowing them time to meet their concerns. But they said they would comply with a federal consent decree the three cities signed individually Thursday.

“The law is the law, and the Voting Rights Act isn’t about good intentions and substantial compliance. You just have to comply, so that’s what we’re going to do,” said Bob Kress, Rosemead’s city attorney.

Kress said the city’s polling stations did not initially have enough bilingual workers. That was a result of the higher than expected turnout there because of an election on a controversial Wal-Mart project. But after the city realized the problem, he said, officials quickly hired professional translators to come to the polls.

Rosemead also experienced delays in mailing Chinese- and Vietnamese-language election materials to voters, a fact that Kress that concedes gave voters less time to request absentee ballots.

In addition to those problems, the Justice Department criticized Rosemead for printing the official ballot at polling places in English only, thus forcing non-English speakers to compare it to sample ballots printed in Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese before making their selection.

Paramount was faulted for not providing official ballots in Spanish (72% of the city is Latino, according to the 2000 census). Because the official ballot at the polling places was in English only, Spanish-speaking voters had to compare it with the sample ballot, which was printed in Spanish.

Paramount City Atty. John Cavanaugh defended the city’s efforts, saying that it offered Spanish translation guides to the official ballot, and had instructional guides in Spanish that clearly explained to Spanish-reading voters how to vote.

“The Department of Justice painted a picture that Spanish-speaking voters wouldn’t know what to do, and that’s simply not true,” Cavanaugh said.

A UC Irvine political science professor said, however, the Voting Rights Act clearly states that all election documents must be printed in all the languages, and that includes official ballots being printed in those languages. Otherwise, those who speak Spanish, Chinese or Vietnamese, for example, might feel uncomfortable asking for help with voting.

“The reason Congress has mandated this is because local jurisdictions have historically discriminated against non-English speakers by denying them access to materials they don’t understand,” professor Louis Desipio said. “The rule is pretty explicit that the ballot has to be in languages that are covered” by the act.

Azusa, the Justice Department said in court papers, failed to fully translate its official ballot, absentee ballot forms and other polling signs into Spanish. But Mayor Diane Chagnon said the city received no complaints from voters, and said that all polls included bilingual workers.

The federal consent decrees the cities signed require them to correct the situation. The decrees still require court approval.

But the cities criticized the way federal officials notified them of the violations.

Cavanaugh said that when Paramount agreed to meet with auditors from the Justice Department in March, city officials requested feedback on whether they could improve the way they conduct their elections.

The city did not receive any response until about two weeks ago, when the department threatened a lawsuit, Cavanaugh said.

“Our biggest complaint was this was not a very good way of helping us to comply when we gave them many opportunities to let them say, look, this is what you need to do for the next election,” Cavanaugh said. “And we would have done it.”

Officials at the Justice Department could not be reached Friday to respond to the criticism.