English First Foundation Issue Brief

produced by English First Foundation

8001 Forbes Place, Suite 109

Springfield, VA 22151

(permission to reproduce is granted, provided credit is given to English First Foundation)

Bilingual Ballots: Election Fairness or Fraud?

Bilingual ballots remain as controversial today as they were in 1975--perhaps even more so. As Congress considers this aspect of the Voting Rights Act, it may well be forced to make a difficult choice.

Advocates of bilingual ballots are demanding that the Voting Rights Act be changed to require more bilingual ballots and election materials for more people. Opponents of the bilingual ballots see the upcoming renewal process of this part of the Voting Rights Act as a chance for Congress to rectify its error of 1975.

This issue brief is intended to provide a summary of potential controversies in this area.

Contrary to popular belief, bilingual ballots were not required by the Voting Rights Act until the 1975 amendments were added to it. That it took a decade for Congress to legislate in this area indicates that the problem of the Khmer-speaker confronted with a ballot written in English was not of the same intensity as that of an African-American attempting to register to vote at a rural Alabama courthouse in 1963.

Advocates of bilingual ballots had the same problem then that they do today: there is little evidence that bilingual ballots were needed by many people.

Granted, the Spanish-speaking citizens of Puerto Rico are United States citizens. But until recently, both English and Spanish were the official languages of the Island and both languages were taught in its schools. American Indians are also qualified voters who may or may not have language difficulties.

Fortunately for supporters of bilingual ballots, anecdotal evidence exists for virtually any point one might wish to prove. Abigail Thernstrom's book, Whose Votes Count? demonstrates that the need for bilingual ballots was scarcely evident even during the hearings Congress held on the issue. She notes on page 54 that the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) had a tough time finding any witnesses able to honestly testify as to their need for bilingual voting services:

If the hearings were a staged event, the performance was less than perfect. "We were able to produce those [needed] horror stories," a MALDEF representative would later say. "But not many of them. . . . We did it really by the skin of our teeth."

And again on page 56, Thernstrom notes:

Many of the charges came from a handful of witnesses reporting on very few Texas counties . . . "What we found," one lobbyist later frankly admitted, "we portrayed . . . as a giant state-wide pattern, which it really wasn't."

If the problem bilingual ballots were supposed to address among Hispanic citizens was hard to find, what of the American Indians?

The need for bilingual services among these voters turns out to be at least debatable. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-AK) was moved to introduce S.1595, the Alaska Native Languages Preservation and Enhancement Act of 1991. The Senate passed this legislation on November 25, 1991. This bill would allow $10 million to be spent to preserve languages which are otherwise expected to die out shortly, primarily because children are not learning the ancestral languages, and have not been for some time. One does not need to preserve things which are growing robustly.

The question of continued need for this service is also begged by a statement in an article on Indian religion in Mother Jones:

[U]nlike on many reservations, the traditional language is alive and spoken everywhere; when the photocopier in the tribal office breaks down, the secretaries discuss how to fix it in Havasupai (emphasis added).<1>

The tribe in question has its reservation in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which can be reached only by helicopter or a seven mile hike. Clearly, physical isolation has helped preserve their language. Most reservations are not nearly so remote from English-speaking America. That is why traditional Indian languages are disappearing.

Supporters of bilingual ballots have argued that these services are desperately needed. MALDEF released a report in 1982 which claimed bilingual ballots were essential for Hispanic voters. The MALDEF study reported that 70% of those citizens who spoke only Spanish would be less likely to register and vote if they could no longer get oral help in Spanish.<2> Fully 72% of monolingual Spanish speakers claimed they would be less likely to vote if bilingual ballots were discontinued.<3>

(It is not without interest that this same MALDEF `study' claimed that fully 21% of the citizens classified as "English Monolingual" stated they would be "less likely" to vote "without Spanish help" and 14% of the "English Monolinguals" supposedly were less likely to vote without a bilingual ballot.<4> Why a substantial percentage of persons who speak just English needed "Spanish help" and bilingual ballots was not explained.)

Yet the same people who support bilingual ballots because people aren't learning English turn around and say a Constitutional amendment making English the official language of government in America is unnecessary because everyone is learning the language. To attack the proposed English Language Amendment (ELA), American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel, Antonio Califa used two recent studies which "show that the rate of English language acquisition by both native-born and immigrant Hispanophones (first language heard is Spanish) is impressive."<5>

Califa went on to suggest that by the second generation, the sons and daughters of Hispanic immigrants have a "working knowledge in both the native language and English. By the third generation, English is the preferred language."<6> One study Califa quoted claimed that:

Eventually, 52% of the Hispanophones will adopt English as their principal language. Of the remainder, 39.7% will be Spanish bilingual. Spanish monolinguals comprise 8.3% of the native-born Hispanophone population.<7>

Yet another opponent of the English Language Amendment, Joseph Leibowicz, suggested that support for such a law was directed against Hispanics because Hispanics were not assimilating:

The proponents of the ELA are at least partially correct: the situation of Spanish speakers in the United States may actually be "unique" in several significant respects. . . .

All these elements--a substantial indigenous population; a continuing influx of new Spanish speakers; large, densely populated areas that are essentially monolingual Spanish; a high percentage of sojourners with no long-term commitment to American society--promote mother-tongue maintenance and may slow English acquisition.<8>

Thus, opposition to bilingual ballots is argued to be anti-Hispanic because (1) Hispanics are learning English anyway, making an English Language Amendment to the Constitution unnecessary and, simultaneously, that (2) Hispanics are not learning English, so bilingual ballots are necessary. And when MALDEF suggests that bilingual ballots help monolingual English-speakers to vote, one starts wondering whether advocates of bilingual ballots have allowed advocacy to triumph over accuracy in the name of preserving bilingual ballots.

The real intention of bilingual ballot advocates may be gleaned from a comment by a Canadian official:

According to Maxwell Yalden, the commissioner of official languages for Canada, "We do not have the separatist problem in Canada because we have two languages. We have the problem because we refuse to give status to the other [French] language."<9>

What this suggests is that bilingual ballots are an exercise in building self-esteem for professional ethnic activists. It does not matter to them if most Hispanics are learning English or not. The essential thing is that Spanish (and other languages) appear on the ballot; that the language of their immigrant ancestors is given "status" by the federal government. This is nothing more than taxpayer-funded occupational therapy.

One advocate goes so far as to suggest that inability to speak English is as immutable a handicap as a missing leg:

Admittedly, a person's language is not "immutable" as that term is used in the context of race, gender, or national origin. As one court has noted, however, for many who speak only one language, the practical reality is that "language may well be an immutable characteristic like skin color, sex or place of birth." For adults in particular, especially those with limited financial resources, learning a new language may be extremely difficult or impossible. The immutability of a trait suggests that courts should guard vigilantly against that trait's becoming the basis of discriminatory state actions.<10>

Thus, adults cannot be expected to learn English and, thanks to bilingual education programs, neither can children.<11> There is clearly an agenda at work here that is determined to destroy the linguistic unity of this nation of immigrants.

Those who are pushing this agenda evidently see nothing wrong with misrepresenting evidence, including Supreme Court cases, if that should further their cause. Consider a legal brief submitted to Congress by the firm of Hogan & Hartson on behalf of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). This brief claims that "[a]nother major step towards the development of bilingual education in this country came in 1974 with the Supreme Court's Lau v. Nichols decision. . . . The Court also noted the effects of a school system's failure to provide special bilingual instruction."<12>

Actually, though MALDEF had asked the Supreme Court to order schools to conduct classes in Spanish for Spanish-speaking students, the Court refused to do so.<13> In fact, the Court explicitly refused to require schools to adopt any specific approach:

Teaching English to the students of Chinese ancestry who do not speak the language is one choice. Giving instruction to this group in Chinese is another. There may be others.<14>

English First is well aware that the federal government used the Lau ruling as a rationale for requiring so-called transitional bilingual education programs for Spanish-speaking children. MALDEF's 1992 brief uses artfully crafted language to convey a misleading impression to the nation's legislators.

It is safe to say that because of its nearby border, Hispanic immigrants from Mexico will demonstrate the greatest "need" for bilingual voting services among America's recent immigrants. This is because most immigrants are required to demonstrate a knowledge of English before they can achieve citizenship, and thus the right to vote. But a child born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen, even if his or her parents arrived on U.S. soil illegally. Obviously Mexicans have an easier time crossing the border than, say, Taiwanese, simply because of geographic proximity.

By 1906, Congress had decided to require oral English literacy as a condition of becoming a naturalized American citizen.<15> In 1950, Congress added the requirement that persons who wish to become citizens must "demonstrate an understanding of the English language, including an ability to read, write and speak words in ordinary usage in the English language."<16>

Since only citizens may vote, legal immigrants who became naturalized citizens since 1950 can be expected to be at least somewhat literate in English. And since almost two full generations have passed since English literacy was required to achieve citizenship, it is no wonder that advocates of bilingual ballots must resort to opinion polls and a few horror stories. The need just doesn't exist.

Bilingual ballots are just one more way that well-meaning people hinder the progress of certain ethnic groups in this nation. Most Americans know, intuitively, that English is the language of this country and that those who do not learn it will be unable to take their rightful place in what remains the American dream. A 1990 poll reported in the Houston Chronicle found that 87% of Hispanics surveyed thought it their "duty to learn English."

It seems clear to English First that the "problems" bilingual ballots were supposed to resolve were, and remain, practically non-existent. A person who achieves citizenship, and thus the right to vote, is unlikely indeed to have absolutely no knowledge of the English language.

The Senate hearings on this issue also suggest that bilingual ballots are just the beginning. Many witnesses complained that there were X percent of a given minority in a place but only a much smaller percentage of that minority was elected to office. Bilingual ballots today may mean strict quotas for all minorities among elected officeholders tomorrow.

That policy is now underway for Hispanics. Gloria Molina represents many fewer voters than other supervisors in Los Angles do. Her "Hispanic" district is full of Hispanics who are not citizens and thus not entitled to vote.

The pro-quotas side can be spotted by their constant use of the phrase "persons of voting age" in their complaints. If fewer Laotians of voting age vote than do whites, the quota crowd shouts discrimination. Never mind that non-citizens, convicted felons, or persons who do not register to vote cannot legally vote.

Section 203 is invoked by looking at census data for a given jurisdiction. If people identify themselves as citizens and speakers of another language, that is where the investigation stops.

The Census Bureau publicizes that it is forbidden to share its data with other agencies. Even so, the chances that a person who is here illegally will confess that to a census taker is at best problematic.

Takoma Park, Maryland, has decided to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. Washington, D.C. is considering similar legislation. This is an open invitation to all kinds of fraud and abuse.

Will non-citizens be kept on a separate election roster at each polling place? If not, it is possible that the non-citizen may `accidentally' be allowed to vote in federal or state elections. Will there be special "non-citizen" ballots or voting machines when elections combine federal and local matters? If not, the chance of ineligible voters shifting the results of elections strongly exists.

Birthday presents, car rebates and bilingual ballots have one thing in common: a person may not need something but will happily accept what appears to be free.

When the General Accounting Office was asked to investigate the costs of bilingual election services in 1986, it found the process less costly than might have been expected. Of the 375 political subdivisions (in 21 states) covered by the law,<17> 83 jurisdictions stated it cost roughly $388,000 to provide written bilingual assistance and 39 jurisdictions stated it cost them about $30,000 to provide oral assistance for the 1984 general election.<18>

Advocates of increased coverage for the act are welcome to suggest that this sum seems relatively small. Yet costs are held down on the basis of four factors:

(1) Most of this assistance was done in Spanish.

According to the GAO:

Hispanics were the most commonly served minority group, with 96 percent of the respondents that offered written assistance doing so for Hispanics, and 89 percent of those offering oral assistance serving Hispanics.<19>

Yet under the proposed legislation, there will not only be a vast increase in coverage of the act, but, because of other proposed amendments, in the number of languages in which assistance must be provided. Simply by increasing the amount of oral assistance required to assist speakers of relatively obscure Indian languages to vote, the act will doubtlessly drive up these costs, and probably by a substantial margin.

Asian and Pacific Islanders comprise just one census category but speak many languages. An interpreter fluent in the language spoken by most Cambodians will be of little help to a Pakistani who knows little English.

Section 203 requires that a county covered under it that "provides any registration or voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance, or other materials or information relating to the electoral process, including ballots, it shall provide them in the language of the applicable minority group as well as in the English language." There will be a lot of translating that must be done in addition to that required for a ballot. All these materials cannot be produced in a multitude of languages at no cost to the taxpayer.

(2) Jurisdictions with large linguistic minorities are presently excluded from coverage.

Advocates of a renewal of Section 203 are also on record as wishing to eliminate or modify the requirement that a county must have at least 5% of its population be Limited English Proficient (LEP) citizens of voting age.<20>

To lower this threshold will impose vast new costs on those who can least afford it--urban America. Bilingual Spanish services would be required in Los Angles, San Diego, Orange and San Bernadino Counties, CA, Cook County, IL, and Queens County, NY, while bilingual Asian (languages unspecified) services could be also required in Los Angles and San Francisco Counties, CA and Kings, Queens and New York Counties, NY.<21>

In addition, hard pressed rural America will find its election costs greatly increased if the Native American Rights Fund has its way. This group suggests Section 203's bilingual requirements could be invoked if a group of speakers of a particular Indian language "live on or near a reservation or other identifiable Indian community, and they exceed five percent of the total Indian voting age population of that reservation or community."<22>

A community forced to provide bilingual services in any Indian language spoken by 5% of the population of a reservation will be forced to deal with some highly obscure and difficult to translate languages. Qualified interpreters may well be nonexistent. But the legal requirement will exist whether interpreters exist or not.

(3) Much of the translation help is provided by volunteers.

According to the GAO study:

Most jurisdictions incur no costs to provide oral assistance because they do not hire additional workers. Instead, they seek to find poll workers who are able to converse in the covered minority language. Also, jurisdictions generally pay bilingual poll workers at the same rate as monolingual workers. In some cases, jurisdictions do not actually have bilingual workers stationed at the polling places. Rather, someone is available to come to the polling place, if called, to provide assistance. These standby workers may be volunteers, or they may be paid, or paid only if they are actually called upon to assist at the polling place.<23>

According to the jurisdiction breakdowns in Appendix 2 of the GAO report, volunteers or other no additional cost services have predominated in most parts of the country. In fact it is so common that it is used as an argument as to why the costs of multi-language voting is supposedly not high: "for small counties, oral voting assistance may be provided at almost no cost as most interpreters volunteer their services gratuitously."<24>

Just because something has been free or relatively inexpensive to obtain in the past is no guarantee that it will remain inexpensive in the future. Gasoline used to be 25 cents a gallon, but a government should not count on filling its motor pool continuously at such a price. If Section 203 is renewed with expanded coverage, it will require many governments to locate interpreters of fairly uncommon languages.

A fluent Hmong-English translator who knows that the county will likely be sued if it does not use his services is less likely to donate them than is the Spanish major at the local college. Spanish translators are relatively plentiful. Translators of other languages are less so. The rules of supply and government-created demand will doubtlessly have an impact on the taxpayers at election time.

(4) Bilingual services could be legally targeted to those who specifically request them.

Complaints about the cost of bilingual ballots were rampant prior to the 1982 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act itself. In 1976, the first year bilingual election materials and services were required, Los Angeles County was forced to spend $854,360 just for the primary election.<25> Los Angeles was able to lower its costs to $135,200 by the 1980 general election, primarily by "targeting" bilingual services only to those who request them.<26> "Targeting" also helped San Diego County reduce its bilingual election expenses from $126,000 for the 1976 general election to $54,000 in 1980.<27>

It appears that under proposed amendments to this part of the Voting Rights Act, targeting will be illegal. Furthermore, many districts which have voluntarily provided multilingual voting services in the past will be required to do so by law, which means informal and inexpensive approaches may have to be replaced with expensive and broad ones. Sacramento County, California calculates that the bill would add $50,000 to the cost of every election just for bilingual ballots because it will be required to provide these services not simply for those few who request them.<28>

Supporters of the bill argue that bilingual (or multilingual) ballots should be required, "no matter what the cost is," as Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina told a Senate subcommittee. One advocate of an expansion of multilingual voting requirements put it even more bluntly:

Many people express an instinctive worry that a constitutional rule that requires states to provide multilingual voting assistance to every non-English speaker would be excessively costly and administratively burdensome in areas with only a few non-English speakers. As with most constitutional requirements, however, states would have the flexibility to develop systems for identifying voters needing the assistance and for implementing the multilingual system. Courts should nevertheless place a heavy burden on states to accommodate every voter needing assistance unless such accommodation would be clearly unreasonable. For example, if there were only one person within a 500 mile radius that needed assistance, and no one was available in that area to interpret the ballot, assistance might not be a reasonable demand on the state (emphasis author's).<29>

Granted, Congress is not considering setting the standard quite as high as this advocate suggests. But judges may have other ideas. While Congress did not think to require bilingual ballots until 1975, judges began requiring bilingual ballots and election materials for Puerto Rican voters in New York and Pennsylvania in 1974.<30>

Supporters of bilingual ballots suggest that without them, persons who do not understand English may well have "an incentive for such citizens to cast uninformed votes."<31> Yet they forget (or ignore) the fact that translation is far from an exact science. A bilingual ballot or interpreter may not convey the real meaning of a referendum issue or beliefs of a candidate. A vote cast on that basis is not only "uninformed;" it may well reflect precisely the opposite of a voter's real intentions.

This bill would require elections conducted in areas with Indian populations of a certain number to provide all materials in the language(s) of the affected tribes--even if the language does not have a written form. This opens the door to fraud and misrepresentation of issues by "interpreters." Such fraud has already been documented by U.S. Assistant Attorney General John Dunne during the 1988 and 1990 elections:

[E]ven when translators were available, the message conveyed to minority language voters often did not resemble the issue on the ballot and it was impossible for a minority language individual to cast an informed vote.<32>

In his oral testimony that same day, Mr. Dunne noted that a Victim's Rights Initiative was translated as referring to any number of things other than the issue at hand. He added that many Indian languages do not even have English equivalent words for complicated ballot questions.

When one considers that even fair-minded lifelong English speakers may disagree as to the proper wording of a ballot initiative on euthanasia, gun control or Proposition 13-style taxation limits, one realizes that accurate, disinterested translation cannot be taken for granted.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen mentioned this kind of problem in his column of March 5, 1992:

This [false advertising by candidates] is especially the case when it comes to commercials on ethnic radio stations or ads in ethnic newspapers. They amount to the back channel of politics. Often unmonitored by the press, they can be the vehicle for the dirtiest of politics.

Government bureaucrats are not known for finding the least costly way to accomplish a goal. If one interpreter makes mistakes, bureaucrats could demand localities pay another person to keep an eye on the interpreter. Or they could do what bilingual education bureaucrats attempted to do to Alaska: require the state pay to develop written forms of Eskimo languages and then teach them to the Eskimo children before teaching the same children English.

The ability to misrepresent issues in a language which does not have a written form should not be understated. A tape recording may seem like a good solution to this problem. But what of the voter who understands neither the ballot nor the tape? Demands for human translators are inevitable. And with human, on-site translators, there will always be the potential for abuse.

The costs of government certification of translators may be inferred from a study of court appointed translators by Bill Piatt, an opponent of official English:

Through 1986, the Administrative Officer of the Courts had spent over one million dollars in test development and administration for Spanish language interpreters, had administered a Spanish interpretation test more than seven thousand times (some took the test more than once), and yet had been able to certify only 292 interpreters.<33>

Since ballot referendum questions are written in language which often resembles "legalese," or are artfully drafted so one must 'vote yes to vote no,' the high cost of certifying courtroom interpreters would be multiplied many-fold if governments were forced to certify interpreters in all languages used in a given voting jurisdiction.

Obviously so. It is basically understood that one of the disadvantages of being unable to speak the national language is the constant threat of being given false or misleading information in one's native tongue.

Yet this statement simply demonstrates the dangers of government sponsored-translation services. The government cannot guarantee the accuracy of all translators at every polling place. Yet a person who seeks translation from a volunteer has vastly lower expectations than one seeking translation from a government employee or government certified individual. Those who seek the advice of partisan volunteers at the polling place know to take certain statements with a grain of salt. One does not expect officials of one's government to lie. Accordingly, a government translator may be accorded more credibility by voters than he or she may deserve.

Government-written bilingual ballots are unnecessary for another reason. I find when I go to vote that the problem is not getting help in casting my ballot but avoiding all the "helpers" and their literature as I walk to the polls. Political parties can be expected to print materials in whatever languages the electorate requires even if the Voting Rights Act itself were to vanish tomorrow.

The use of volunteer translators is already common. Of course, what is volunteered for free may be the product of a political agenda. We do well to remember a Passaic, New Jersey Assemblyman who managed to falsify 5,000 voter registration forms and a Patterson Council President, who told workers "they could register convicted criminals and immigrants with alien cards."<34> And, as we have seen above, should the government require something, it is less likely to be able to get that service at no charge.

The people most likely to understand the problems of bilingual ballots are precisely those who are bilingual. They tend to agree that the answer to this question is no.

There is an enlightening book out called The Bilingual Courtroom. The author suggests that there are many problems in translating legal language from English to another language, Spanish in this case. Sometimes there is literally no corresponding word in Spanish (or any other language) for an English word. And sometimes, a Spanish word which is used to mean the same thing as the English word also can mean something else entirely.

If the answer to this question is indeed "no" (a point all but conceded by organized bilingual ethnic activists) then bilingual ballots are not nearly enough. Congress might well consider requiring all political commercials, all campaign literature and all new coverage to be translated into every language spoken among the electorate.

It is worth noting that this is precisely what is argued in Bill Piatt's book, Only English? on page 150:

There may or may not be a right to be informed via broadcast media in a foreign language. As a result, while a voter arriving at the polls who suffers a language barrier may be entitled to a bilingual ballot, he or she may not understand the issues or the positions of the candidates upon which he or she is voting if the public affairs programming in the local media has been presented exclusively in English.

Lawsuits in this area can be expected. And the outcome of such litigation is at best unpredictable.

Much is made of the supposed threat of official English laws by supporters of bilingual ballots. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) appears to argue that bilingual ballots must be required by the federal government because of the presence of official English state laws.

MALDEF's demands for bilingual ballots and bilingual government services of all kinds upset many people. These costly programs, like bilingual education, appear to have graduated a second generation of English illiterates who, MALDEF will claim, now need bilingual services as adults. This is the equivalent of a young man who kills his parents and then asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan.

Americans are traditionally welcoming of immigrants. And statistics show that most immigrants want to learn the language of this, their adopted country so that they can take advantage of the opportunities this nation has to offer. National, government enforced bilingualism is alien to the history of this nation. MALDEF may wish to make America another Canada in which only those fluent in both English and Spanish may dream of working for their government. But this is not the goal of the people MALDEF claims to represent, nor is it the wish of most other Americans.

MALDEF's bilingual policies and lobbying used to take place in a vacuum. Fish don't notice water and English-speakers used to take it as a given that English was this nation's language of government. MALDEF's successes came to the notice of the rest of America and the rest of America was outraged. They started passing official English initiatives by large majorities. (If ever allowed to work its will, Congress would too.)

Now MALDEF claims the laws its unceasing whining provoked demonstrate why America should accept more of their demands. This attitude is bound to make Americans less accepting of immigrants generally as it drives up the cost of accepting them.

Most Americans wish to continue to welcome refugees from troubled lands. But if that welcome requires hard-pressed taxpayers to import bilingual teachers, hire bureaucrats fluent in the new immigrants' language(s), reprint most government documents and otherwise meet the demands of the professional bilingual lobby, that welcome is jeopardized. MALDEF and its allies sow the seed of xenophobia and then complain when their crop comes in.

Furthermore, bilingual ballot provisions are sometimes used in ways which are a clear affront to the principles of democracy. The right to vote is fundamental. When Congress legislates in this area, it must be careful that in the name of so-called "fairness" it does not invite new corruptions of the democratic process nor vast expenses upon states or candidates.

We do well to remember that not so long ago, the United States Supreme Court was forced to decide whether a successful citizen ballot initiative in the state of Florida violated the Voting Rights Act because the petitions used to put the measure on the ballot were not translated into Spanish in 6 of the 67 counties in Florida covered by the Act (Delgado v. Smith 88-1327). And this was not an isolated attempt to abuse the Voting Rights Act. A similar effort was made in Colorado.

This was not a use of the Voting Rights Act to protect the right of citizens to be heard. Instead, this was a case where an attempt was made to use the Voting Rights Act to deny the voice of the citizens of Florida, who passed the ballot measure by a vote of 84-16%

Obviously, since the measure in question was an official English amendment to the Florida constitution, we at English First had an interest in this decision. But every citizen, particularly those many African-American citizens who suffered so long without the right to vote, have a definite interest in seeing that those who would use the Voting Rights Act as a political weapon to overturn the results of fair elections are prevented from doing so.

Should Congress wish to continue along this path, English First regrets that there will be unfortunate, but predictable consequences. Resentment at the costs of a multi-language election process in which decisions can be regularly overturned by a judge in cahoots with representatives of special interest groups can only be expected to arise. Accordingly, Section 203 should not be renewed.

Notes

<1> Baum, Sacred Places, MOTHER JONES, Mar.-Apr. 1992, at 32, 37.

<2> Guerra, Voting Rights and the Constitution: The Disenfranchisement of Non-English Speaking Citizens, 97 YALE L.J. 1419, 1430 (1988).

<3> Id. at 1431.

<4> Id.

<5> Califa, Declaring English the Official Language: Prejudice Spoken Here, 24 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 293, 314 (1989).

<6> Id. at 314.

<7> Id. at 316.

<8> Leibowicz, The Proposed English Language Amendment: Shield or Sword?, 3 YALE L. & POL'Y REV. 519, 522-23 (1985).

<9> Id. at 533.

<10> Official English: Federal Limits on Efforts to Curtail Bilingual Services in the States, 100 HARV. L. REV. 1345, 1352-1353 (1987).

<11> See Roos, Bilingual Education: The Hispanic Response to Unequal Educational Opportunity, 42 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 111, 124-125, note 64 ("The most recent study of the impact on bilingual education on students . . . in 1978 . . . indicated no gain in student achievement in either English language skills or in mathematics . . . in some cases, comparable students in traditional classrooms made slightly greater gains in English languages skills. . . . The author, however, is of the deeply pessimistic view that educational research is not likely to shed much light on the subject. The author agrees with the opinion expressed at a meeting on October 5, 1977 . . . Vice President Mondale . . . stated that when all the research results were in, one had to trust one's instincts. And it was instinctive knowledge that children learn best in a language they understand.) Roos, at the time was the director of education litigation for MALDEF. If MALDEF is willing to support bilingual education despite research evidence of its failure to achieve its Congressionally mandated goal of improved English competence, one suspects that its agenda does not encompass improved English for children or a commitment to a disinterested search for workable solutions.

<12> HOGAN & HARTSON, REDRESSING IMPEDIMENTS TO VOTING FACING LANGUAGE MINORITIES: THE NEED TO REAUTHORIZE AND EXPAND SECTION 203 OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT 74-75 (March 4, 1992).

<13> See Brief of Amici Curiae Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, American G.I. Forum, League of United Latin American Citizens and Association of Mexican American Educators at 13, Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974) (No. 72-6520) ("Contrary to the specialized education physically handicapped children are given . . . Spanish-speaking children lag behind educationally until they make the extra effort to learn a language--English--very unlike the one with which they are familiar. Failure to provide Spanish language instruction damages the student not only educationally, but emotionally as well"[emphasis in original].)

<14> Lau, supra, at 565.

<15> Leibowitz, The Official Character of Language in the United States: Literacy Requirements for Immigration, Citizenship, and Entrance into American Life, 15 AZTLAN 25, 47 (1984).

<16> Id.

<17> The 375 figure may strike some readers as high. But there are two ways a jurisdiction may be federally required to provide bilingual election services. Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 presently covers 197 counties. Statement of Supervisor Gloria Molina before the Subcomm. on the Constitution of the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, Hearing on the Voting Rights Act Language Assistance Amendments of 1992 (February 26, 1992) ("Molina Statement"). However Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act also mandates bilingual assistance if certain conditions are met, a "formula [that] draws in the entire states of Alaska, Arizona, and Texas, and counties in California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota." Statement of John Dunne, Assistant Attorney General before the Subcomm. on the Constitution of the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, Hearing on the Voting Rights Act Language Assistance Amendments of 1992 (February 26, 1992) ("Dunne Statement").

<18> UNITED STATES GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE, BILINGUAL VOTING ASSISTANCE: COSTS OF AND USE DURING THE NOVEMBER 1984 GENERAL ELECTION, September, 1986, at 1,2.

<19> Id. at 14.

<20> Molina Statement, supra, note x.

<21> Id.

<22> NATIVE AMERICAN RIGHTS FUND, AMERICAN INDIAN TRIBES AND SECTION 203: THE LANGUAGE ASSISTANCE PROVISION OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT (1991) at 5.

<23> GAO Report, supra, note 18, at 20.

<24> Guerra, supra, note 2, at 1435, note 92.

<25> S. REP. No. 417, 97th Cong., 2nd Sess. 65 (1982) reprinted in 1982 U.S. CODE CONG. & ADMIN. NEWS 177, 243.

<26> Id.

<27> Id.

<28> $50,000 cost seen for Spanish Ballot, Sacramento Bee, February 26, 1992.

<29> Guerra, supra, note 2, at 1435, note 89.

<30> Id. at 1436, note 94.

<31> Leibowicz, supra note 8, at 548.

<32> Dunne Statement, supra, note 17.

<33> Piatt, Attorney as Interpreter: A Return to Babble, 20 N. MEX. L.R. 1, 6 (note 40), (Winter, 1990).

<34> N.Y. Times, Sept. 30, 1990.