Today's Seattle Times reports that "Foreign-language ballots could lose legal underpinning"
the section of the federal Voting Rights Act that required King County to provide ballots in Chinese, and three other Washington counties to offer them in Spanish, will expire next year.Good.
The focus of the article is that
some worry that many like [naturalized Chinese immigrant Qiu Feng] Pang will be left without a voice in one the most basic guarantees of U.S. citizenshipWhat nonsense. The article ignores several points, among them:
* There are millions of naturalized citizens around the country who speak languages other than those that supposedly have a large enough number of voters to qualify for ballot status. It's neither practical nor desirable to offer ballot materials in every language. Those voters have as much of a voice as any of us. They can either read the ballot in English or have someone else assist them.
* The number of people in King County who actually choose the Chinese ballots is negligible. The article mentions that about 1,500 such ballots were issued to voters for the November 2005 election (this includes mail ballots that were sent out but not returned by the voter). This is a mere 0.19% of the 771,000 ballot that were issued in King County to all voters last November. This Chinese ballot voters are even a small minority among the limited English proficiency Chinese-speaking elgible voters (10,535 in 2002 according to this report). And the limited English voters are a presumably small percentage of the overall Chinese population, not o
* Meanwhile, Deanron is attempting to force the 30% or so of voters who prefer to vote at the polls to vote by mail, on the grounds that 70% of voters have voted by mail in the last election, therefore everybody should have to vote by mail in perpetuity. Nevertheless, Deanron also dedicates inordinate resources and attention to pander to the few hundred Chinese ballot voters. Until they finally changed the phone system, you couldn't even call into King County Elections without having to listen to a Chinese greeting. Some key election forms are available only as an English/Chinese bilingual document, making them so cluttered that they are needlessly confusing for the 1.2 million English speaking voters.
The foreign language ballot provisions of the Voting Rights Act should be allowed to expire next year. Universal voting in English is central to our melting pot. Let alone the expense and distraction of duplicating infrastructure to cater to tiny minorities. The last thing this country needs is to cater to linguistic minorities and give immigrants more incentives not to assimilate.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 13, 2006 11:15 AM | Email ThisRead the article by Lornet Turnbull, and it is a good example of Seattle Times silliness. It's a shame that Frank Blethen's partners can do good work such as the Native American Housing Scandal, The Fred Hutchinson Drug Testing Scandal, and UWMC Medicare Billing Irregularities; but then they drink Seattle kool aid, shoot the neighbor's dog, and publish this foolishness.
I'm thinking of moving back across the pond and demanding they publish all government forms in American English. Go figure.
Posted by: Green Lake Mark on March 13, 2006 11:49 AMIf one language is given privilege over the myriads of other non-English communications, isn't that a crushing of diversity? A blatant favoritism? It is. And such will continue unless every one of the thousands of dialects which are (or even might be) spoken by immigrants are all printed on the ballots and election materials.
So as long as we're going to blow off linguistic diversity anyway, by brutally excluding Tamil and Arabic and Cyrillic scripts from King County ballots - let's revert to plain English.
After all, doesn't the award of citizenship require some proficiency in English? It couldn't be that our eminent King County administrators seek to encourage voting by non-citizens, could it?
Posted by: Hank Bradley on March 13, 2006 11:57 AMToday ' Seattle Times > The reported " Foreign language ballots may lose legal basis " A federal voting rights violations, to provide Chinese language ballots for King County and three counties in Washington to provide them Spain will expire next year. Good.Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on March 13, 2006 12:43 PM
(I meant to say this was English -> Chinese via Google)
Remember, Spain will expire next year.
Posted by: Robert on March 13, 2006 01:04 PMYou'll only be understood if you speak in English.
What's the disconnect? ;)
When my ancestors came here from Europe, they learned the language and integrated. My wife came here from Asia, learned the language and integrated.
Why should we enable people who come here to NOT learn the language and yet stay self-segregated?
I currently live in Miami, where there are thousands of citizens who speak only Spanish or Creole, yet have been living here for decades. They are able to do business, watch TV, listen to radio, take driver license tests, deal with the local government, and vote in those languages. We give them no incentive at all to become part of what had made the USA great: E Pluribus Unum.
Posted by: Baboy Ako on March 13, 2006 03:33 PMI completely agree with you. I'm a foreigner living in Korea now, and I can remember taking a driving test here. One of the police offiers administrating the test actually spent hours translating it into English simply for me only. Of course Koreans are pretty obsessed with learning English as I'm sure you know, so the police officer may have gotten some personal benefit from doing the translation, but still it reflects how different our native country's attitudes are about language. Anyway, keep teaching your kids Korean, they'll thank you for it eventually, not to mention the advantage they will have in the work force by being bi-lingual.
Posted by: Chris on March 13, 2006 03:51 PMYou really think Martin Luther King Jr. County would stop such a practice? You as much as anyone should know the attitude of Sims and the council on such maters.
Posted by: Steve on March 13, 2006 04:57 PM"She no longer needed to copy the "answers" of friends or family onto the mail-in ballot she received at her home in Seattle's Chinatown International District"
Why bother to vote at all if you have to "copy" answers for the ballot? They obviously didn't truly care what the issues were or what the candidates stood for - they just voted like everyone else in the International district! Copied the marks on the ballots that thier friends made...
Now they want us to believe that they actually take time to consider their choices because it's printed in their language? ...Why would that make any sense?
If they voted in the past - without knowing what they were voting for...then they shouldn't have voted at all! If they didn't understand the importance and concept of our nations voting rights...they didn't study very hard in their US Citizenship exam! Maybe they just copied the answers to the US Citizenship exam from their friends too! Maybe they just copy their drivers test from friends too! Maybe they should re-think if they want to be Americans at all?
We probably have one generation of immigrants who actually cared enough to learn our language, customs and rights...and they are simply providing a "template" of their knowledge to subsequent generations who immigrate here from other countries. Allowing the newest immigrants to slide on their knowledge of our country. That's like cheating on a test! Creating uncertified "photo-copied" Americans....
This should make the argument against foreign language ballots that much stronger! It's obvious that immigrants need to learn much more about our country, language and voting rights before they are given citizenship and the right to vote!
What incentive do they have to become "American" - if we simply change everything into their customs, language, etc...? We have enough of the Little China, Little Italy and the Little India districts....Will we need to create a Little America district someday?
It's bad enough that so much of our tax dollars are going to fund *illegal* immigrants - social services and education - but to think that we are also paying for "legal" immigrants to ignore the english language by having ballots and instructions printed up in their various languages..is just absurd!
Posted by: Deborah on March 13, 2006 08:45 PMWhat, no, no fraud here, they're all *really* US Citizens, they just can't speak or read our language.
Posted by: SP Fan on March 13, 2006 10:04 PMTheodore Roosevelt on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN
"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."
Theodore Roosevelt 1907
You might recall I lost my election by 130 or so votes, and now you want to take away the option for 1500 or so voters to actually understand who they are voting for!
Perhaps I would have won if more people understood who I was and what I stood for...
Knock it off Stefan. I want more people understanding what they are voting for, not less.
You are a perfect example of what's wrong with the liberal mindset when it comes to voting. Use a little logic. Since you must know functional English in order to become a citizen, and you must be a citizen to vote, then wouldn't it hold all voters should know functional English... thus negating the need for foreign language ballots? Wouldn't it then also hold that people voting who don't know English probably aren't citizens? And if they aren't citizens, do you really want them to voting in the first place?
Posted by: Mike H on March 14, 2006 12:42 AMIf a recent immigrant who's been naturalized and granted the right to vote is so illiterate in English as to require a foreign language ballot, are they really that serious about the nuance of say, a particular ballot measure? And as even Goldy admits, has anyone bothered to consider how much waste there is in the costs of printing and translation for a no doubt very small percentage of the population? When does it end? And what about a recent emigre from Africa that speaks Swahili? We don't print ballots and voter guides in Swahili, but yet if voting is important to a newly naturalized Tanzinian, I bet they figure our how to get it done in English.
I mean if they were determined to move to the US for a better life, leave their old world behind, find a place to live, go through the naturalization process, and navigate daily life in the US, we are supposed to believe that they don't have the determination to understand an English ballot, or to get help? Do we really have any obligation to bend over backwards with multilingual verbiage in every language for all new immigrants? Most of the citizens of this country are descendents of immigrants and somehow I doubt that our antecedents had the level of pampering today's immigrants receive, yet they somehow survived and made a better life here.
Once again, Goldy exposes that he's merely an ultra progressive living in today's reality intolerant Seattle, viewing every issue through the entitlement-progressive-socialist-microscope, expecting every aspect of our lives to be carefully ladeled out to us from an all giving government.
Sure we should continue to make every effort to bring immigrants in to the US, and to be accomodating, it's what makes this country great. But the US is not a giant fully furnished immigrant welfare destination. It's a place of opportunity. Once you get here, show some courtesy, take some responsibility, respect the privledge of life in a constitutional republic.
If you look past the sanctimonious BS from Goldy, the accusation of a cynical electoral calculation, the appeal to the emotion of his grandmother, etc. there's not much to his argument. He's simply ambulance chasing as usual.
Posted by: Jeff B. on March 14, 2006 01:50 AM(OK. I think it's dumb as mud, but work with me for a minute).
New immigrants are generally all about hard work for greater opportunities. My wife works as a Mandarin teacher in Seattle. Both of us speak excellent English, and good Mandarin (hers better than mine by benefit of having learned the language growing up rather than as an adult). We also have lots and lots of Chinese-born friends, neighbors, parents of students, etc.
Chinese are not as reliably Republican as African-Americans are Democratic, but the R:D count in our circle of friends is probably 3:2 or thereabouts. Given most of these folks live in overwhelmingly Democratic Seattle, I'd consider that nothing short of a miracle.
I don't hang out with many Spanish speakers, Russians, or other substantial immigrant groups in Seattle, but I suspect you would see similar patterns in most immigrants.
Bush's initiatives towards Hispanics both in Texas and as President are well-known. I don't like the man much, but I think he gets it. More immigrants means more Republican voters in the by and by.
So, with that said, if you want to supplant the multicultural Republican party of the future with the dying White one of the past, I strongly support you calling your friends and pushing to make this legislation a reality. After all, shortsighted initiatives with far-reaching adverse consequences in the name of saving a buck or two is what makes the GOP that I personally know and love.
Posted by: jsa on commercial drive on March 14, 2006 06:48 AM