Federal Officials Monitor Voting

The Justice Department has sent monitors to polling places in Los Angeles this year to determine whether the city is violating the federal Voting Rights Act by not providing official ballots in languages other than English.

Los Angeles prints sample ballots in English as well as Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. But at polling places, the official ballot is available only in English, and voters are asked to use their sample ballot as a guide to translate.

City Clerk Frank Martinez said he thought the city’s procedures complied with the Voting Rights Act, which requires that any jurisdiction that has a substantial number of people who speak a language other than English provide all voting materials in that language.

But in other audits this year, the U.S. Justice Department concluded that three smaller cities in Los Angeles County violated the law by printing official ballots only in English; it reached agreements with the communities to provide official ballots in other languages in the future.

Though not commenting on the Los Angeles inquiry, Justice Department officials said the law was clear.

“Section 203 requires translation of all voting materials ... including ballots,” said Eric Holland, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Providing an English-only ballot -- [with] a Spanish sample ballot -- would not meet this requirement.”

Federal officials were sent to Los Angeles to monitor the March mayoral election and the May runoff, part of an investigation of municipalities that are required to offer voting materials in languages other than English. On election day in 2004, the department’s Civil Rights Division quadrupled the number of elections it monitored -- to 87 in 25 states -- compared to the 2000 election.

Ventura County last year agreed to print its official ballots in English and Spanish after the Justice Department investigated its procedures. The county plans to have a single bilingual ballot by next year, said Gene Browning, the assistant registrar.

Riverside County uses a touch-screen voting system, which prompts voters on a video monitor to specify whether they prefer English or Spanish. Orange County uses a similar device, offering electronic ballot versions in Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese.

Los Angeles’ population is 47% Latino and 10% Asian. In the mayoral runoff in May, 25% of voters were Latinos and 5% were Asian, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll.

Los Angeles city voting officials said their system makes it easy for non-English-speaking people to cast ballots. They can use their translated sample ballot as a guide to the official ballot, said Arleen Taylor, chief of elections. Translations can be mailed to voters at their request, and are kept at each polling booth.

“It’s always available there, so they can always match it up [to the official English ballot] and fill in the bubble by placing the booklet right next to the ballot,” said Jinny Park, assistant chief of the elections division.

Martinez, the Los Angeles city clerk who organizes citywide elections, says he does not believe the Voting Rights Act requires the city to print official ballots in other languages.

He said it would be impractical to fit seven languages on one ballot, and logistically difficult to keep track of multiple versions of an official ballot.

“I believe the Voting Rights Act allows for alternative ways for doing things if it’s not practical for putting all the languages on the same ballot,” Martinez said. “We thought the ideas we came up with ... still allowed people to have the information they need to vote.”

Those measures included recruiting more than 1,000 bilingual poll workers, as well as a reserve bilingual poll team.

After the March election, Justice Department officials identified some “relatively minor” signage that had not been translated, Martinez said, including polling place signs. But the city has not received a final monitoring report from the Justice Department.

“We feel very comfortable with our translation of our materials,” Martinez said.

Cerritos was another city to which the Justice Department sent monitors, and officials there are still awaiting a final report. Like Los Angeles, the city’s official ballot was printed in English, while sample ballots in English, Tagalog, Spanish, Korean and Chinese were available at the polls, said Josie Triggs, the city clerk.

Some experts say it’s important to have official ballots translated into languages used by voters who are not native English-speakers.

“The more common case is that somebody who is bilingual but is maybe more comfortable in their [native] language” prefers an official, translated ballot, said Louis Desipio, a political science professor at UC Irvine. It can be particularly important in California, Desipio said, with the often-complex summaries of measures and propositions that appear on the ballot.

Just last week, the Justice Department announced settlements with Azusa, Paramount and Rosemead after concluding they had violated the law. Officials in those cities said they were surprised by the charges, believing that their efforts to translate voting materials complied with federal law. All three cities provided sample ballots in Spanish and other required languages to be used as guides for the official ballot printed in English.

“It was quite a surprise,” said Azusa City Clerk Vera Mendoza. “We thought we were in compliance.”

The push by the Justice Department has not gone unnoticed by elections officials.

The issue came up at a recent meeting of city clerks organized by Los Angeles County. It prompted Long Beach officials to plan to place translated sample ballots in each polling booth, said Gini Galletta, a city clerk specialist there.

Previously, many of the translations, which include Tagalog, Vietnamese and Khmer, had gone unused because few voters called the city to request them, Galletta said.

But the city has no plans to print the actual ballot in languages other than English, she said.

“Up until this time we have never had an issue with that in Long Beach, so [voters] will have the sample ballot to refer to, and at this particular time we think that will be sufficient,” she said. “We could change our mind, but it’s never been an issue.”