By Chris Fuchs
Immigrant advocates said the Chinese translation of the Election Day ballots indicated the Republican column was marked “Democrat” and vice-versa, an error that may have affected Chinese-Americans voting not only for State Supreme Court justices but also for the state Assembly, state Senate and the House of Representatives. The Board of Elections confirmed their account.
“I don't believe there was anything we could have done about it,” said Naomi Bernstein, a spokeswoman for the city Board of Elections. “It wasn't until later in the day that we found out anything about it.”
Throughout Election Day, Ellen Young, the president of the Chinese American Voters Association of Queens, a non-partisan organization in Flushing that registers new citizens to vote, said she received at least a dozen complaints about the transposition of parties and candidates on the ballots, the lack of translators at polling sites and unhelpful election officials.
“At 8 o'clock, I received the first phone call,” Young said. “Then, in the afternoon, someone walked into the office to complain about the ballot error. I said to her, 'What did you do?' and she said, 'I skipped the line because I didn't know who to vote for.'” Young said she had asked an election coordinator at one of the sites to have a translator correct the mistake on a master ballot; the coordinator refused, she said.
The idea of having translators at voting sites does not sit well with everyone. Although translators are not permitted to accompany voters into the booths, City Councilwoman Julia Harrison (D-Flushing), whose district covers downtown Flushing, expressed a degree of skepticism about the role translators play in elections.
In a phone interview, Harrison said she was concerned that translators may project their own political views onto voters, an issue that she said may figure in the race for her council seat next year. Because of term limits, the councilwoman cannot run for re-election in 2001. As a result, her departure his spawned what she said will be a “hotly contested race” for the 20th Council District, a seat set in one of the most diverse communities in the city.
“How do you know in a hotly contested election, with all different kinds of languages” what the translators will tell the voters, she said. “How do you know? By what measure do you appoint or guide or instruct your interpreters?” Harrison said the issue would be moot if the Board of Elections would apply what she believes is a fail-safe remedy – mandatory literacy tests.
“It seems to me,” she said, “especially in view of the relatively large influx of foreign people from all over the world who have difficulty understanding the English language, which is not easy to master, should at least be able to recognize the letters of the alphabet so they can commit to memory the name of the candidates for whom they want to vote.”
Glenn D. Magpantay, a legal fellow of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a civil rights group, said in a phone interview he disagreed with Harrison, arguing that a literacy test goes against the very grain of a Democratic society.
“Isn't the goal to try to get as many people to vote and ease access into democracy?” Magpantay said. “Democracy is not just for the English speakers, not just for white Americans. It's for everyone who comes here, by choice or by birth. And a statement like this is just unconscionable.”
On Election Day, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund monitored voting sites in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan – where turnout was especially high and lines were long – inspecting the polls to ensure that an adequate number of Chinese and Korean translators were on hand to help non-English-speaking voters. Magpantay said that as of presstime, the fund had not compiled a complete list of all the voter complaints they had received.
Still, some of the electoral hurdles Chinese-American voters encountered were in place long before Election Day, immigrant advocates say. One chief complaint, for instance, was that the Board of Elections hotline – 212-VOTE-NYC – offered only the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, and not Mandarin, a dialect spoken by a vast segment of newly arrived immigrants.
Bernstein said the Board of Elections is trying to fortify its base of translators as well as to provide a Mandarin-speaking option for voters who call the hotline next year. But Young, of the Chinese American Voters Association of Queens, said she doubted the Board of Elections would add that option to the hotline.
“I have told the Board of Elections numerous times that it has to change,” she said. “There are a whole lot more Mandarin speaking voters than Cantonese. The Board of Elections is using what they used 50 years ago when all immigrants from China spoke Cantonese.”
