Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Spanish Ballots Ordered in IL County
From the Northwest Indiana Times:
U.S. District Court Judge Allen Sharp signed a memorandum Friday afternoon forbidding county officials from holding an election here that fails to comply with sections of the Voting Rights Act, designed to help citizens who are not proficient in the English language.
The county must provide bilingual interpreters in all 32 city precincts as well as signs in Spanish stating, "If you need assistance with voting in Spanish, let us know and it will be provided."
County officials claimed "state law required all precinct poll workers to speak and write only English language in the poll place to prevent illegal campaigning in a different language." Fears of vote fraud were not ungrounded:
A special Lake County grand jury is investigating dozens of instances of alleged vote fraud in East Chicago, Schererville and other communities against persons for whom English is a second language. Schererville has a large Serbian-speaking community.
There are allegations campaign workers encouraged such persons to vote although they were ineligible because they live outside the voting district. There also are allegations campaign workers illegally assisted them in voting by mail-in absentee ballots by providing pre-completed ballots they needed only to sign.
Meanwhile, the ACLU lost its effort to block Republican "challengers" from monitoring voting in Louisville, KY. The ACLU's suit claimed efforts to ensure only legitimate voters cast a ballot in today's election could "slow voting."
Yet ACLU-approved bilingual ballots and bilingual voting assistance do far more to slow voting down than any ballot security effort anywhere. And ballot security efforts, unlike bilingual ballots, cost the taxpayers nothing.
|posted by Jim on 3:52 AM|
Link
. . .
|
. . .
|
