‘I can finally vote’: Asian language ballots clear path to the ballot box 

Xueying Li, 77, has never exercised her right to vote. 

That’s not because she doesn’t want to — Li has in fact wanted to vote since moving to the U.S. over four decades ago. But as a Chinese American who speaks limited English, navigating the American electoral process has proved impossibly difficult. 

This November, however, Li and thousands of other residents of Philadelphia will have access to their ballots in Chinese for the first time. 

“I am so happy that I can see Chinese on voting machines and ballots in my lifetime, and I can finally vote in the language that I can understand,” Li said in her native Chinese. “With this convenience, I will definitely vote this year. Be a true American!”

It’s not just happening in Philadelphia. Five other jurisdictions across the United States that have met population requirements are preparing translated ballots, hiring bilingual poll workers, and completing community outreach. The 2024 election will be the first presidential election these six jurisdictions will offer Asian language access, though many had a practice run for the 2022 midterm elections. 

The measures could translate into historic turnout among Asian Americans this November, said Stephanie Sun, a community advocate and the director of equity at the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. Sun said she has met dozens who have wanted to vote for years but faced language barriers that made voting impossible — until now. 

Asian Americans are a fast-growing voting bloc, with 15 million eligible voters across the country, according to the Pew Research Center. The group has made turnout gains in recent cycles with 60% voting in the 2020 election, just 7 percent below overall turnout levels. 

The newly-qualified jurisdictions range from populous Dallas County, Texas, which will add Vietnamese ballot access, to tiny Kodiak Island, Alaska, where ballots will be available in multiple Filipino dialects. In each case, newly updated figures from the 2020 census indicate that these Asian communities are large enough to qualify for language access under the federal law, known as Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The law, aimed at creating increased voting equity, requires counties with certain percentages of non-English speaking populations to provide ballots and election materials in other languages. All information provided in English — including registration, voting notices, forms, instructions, assistance and ballots — must also be provided in the “minority language” of each county that falls under Section 203. Counties that must comply with the act are determined by census data.

Election officials, meanwhile, say the process of complying with federal guidelines is often confusing and resource-intensive, especially in jurisdictions adding language access for the first time. The Department of Justice does not provide feedback unless counties are not in compliance with Section 203, so even counties on the cusp of compliance are left in the dark as to how they can improve. 

Clerks also warn that the federal government is doing too little to enforce language access, which could spell trouble in the coming years when the law is set to expire in 2032 and must be renewed by an act of Congress.

“There’s not a broad effort anymore to enforce these laws because a lot of people think you can just get jurisdictions to do this voluntarily,” said Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, a civil rights attorney who successfully sued a Michigan city that refused to provide translated ballots. “That’s just not the case.”

Although Asian Americans comprise a small slice of the electorate in most elections, their voices can make an outsized difference in a swing state like Pennsylvania. In fact, Philadelphia’s qualification under Section 203 prompted the state of Pennsylvania to voluntarily make Chinese options available throughout the entire state. Other states have similarly taken preemptive measures to meet or exceed federal language guidelines. 

As an historic election approaches, AAJA Voices spoke to stakeholders in each of the six newly-covered counties: Philadelphia, Randolph County, Mass., Kodiak Island, Alaska, Maui County, Hawaii, Ramsey County, Minn. and Dallas County, Texas. The interviews revealed a mix of emotions, from voters finding joy in newfound access to the ballot box to election officials worrying about following guidelines and adequately reaching marginalized voters.

Who gets a translated ballot in the U.S.?

Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act requires that certain counties with a high concentration of Asian American or Pacific Islander residents must provide translations of all election materials, including ballots, as well as oral assistance in certain polling places. 

Jurisdictions qualify for the mandate if they have more than 10,000 voters in a single language group with limited English proficiency. Dallas County, for example, had around 11,000 such residents in its Vietnamese community, according to the 2020 census, and became the third county in Texas required to provide Vietnamese election access. A jurisdiction can also qualify if more than 5 percent of all their voters come from a specific language group, such as in Kodiak Island, Alaska, where 7 percent of eligible voters are of Filipino descent. 

That makes the census crucial for these communities. Had Philadelphia counted just 150 fewer Chinese voters in 2020, they would not have qualified, according to Sun, who led numerous census workshops at Asian community centers in 2020. Meanwhile, Korean voters in Fairfax County, Virginia, missed the population threshold by a few hundred and will have to wait at least five more years for a new census count.

Meanwhile, the Korean population in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area does have more than 10,000 such voters, but they straddle the borders between three counties and therefore see no access in any of the three. 

These inefficiencies mean many voters fall through the cracks. In fact, around 75 percent of Asian American voters with limited English proficiency live in places where their language is not covered by the law, according to an estimate by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF).

But even voters in counties that are covered can still face difficulties. In 2020, Hamtramck City, Michigan refused to offer accurate ballots in Bengali, providing instead a rudimentary translation of the general election sample ballot and only translating the Republican Party primary ballot. The city also allegedly provided no translations for their election website and no bilingual poll workers or interpreters.

Non-compliant cities like Hamtramck used to regularly come under scrutiny from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said Lorenzo-Giguere, who worked as an attorney for the division in the 2000s. But the department has not launched legal action against a jurisdiction to enforce Asian language access in the past decade. 

AALDEF sued Hamtramck for Section 203 violations in 2021, and a judge sided with the plaintiffs, ordering election officials to provide the required translations. 

Translating ballots is an arduous and expensive process 

Randolph, the only city in Massachusetts besides Boston required to provide Vietnamese translations, received a letter in early 2022 notifying them that they were required to start printing ballots in Vietnamese because of the 2020 census results.

While the state of Massachusetts handled translations of the statewide ballot, Randolph was tasked with providing all local election materials in Vietnamese. In the upcoming 2024 election, the state of Massachusetts will translate all presidential and state ballots to Vietnamese. 

The state provided suggestions for how to find resources for translation in the community, but Randolph election officials were entirely responsible for finding appropriate translations for materials, hiring poll workers who speak Vietnamese and publicizing the availability of the Vietnamese ballots to the community. 

The process was similar in Ramsey County, Minn., which was required to offer Hmong-language ballots and election materials after the 2020 census showed the county had reached the threshold set out by Section 203. . 

“We got very little guidance,” said David Triplett, a Ramsey County elections official. Though the elections officials in the county met with DOJ officials, “they didn’t tell us what to do.”

Triplett said they worked with the Ramsey County attorney’s office to help interpret Section 203 and come up with compliance measures. Based on the interpretation, the county decided to  contract with a vendor to hire bilingual election judges, provide sample ballots in Hmong and create a budget for gathering Hmong election materials. 

Cheryl Sass, Randolph’s election official, worked with the nonprofit Quincy Asian Resources Inc. to get initial translations for ballots. She also asked them to translate a list of phrases so she could refer back to it without having to repeatedly call them. For immediate translation needs, Sass also contracted with a professional translation company. 

“There’s a cost associated with it, but I’d rather be correct than use Google,” Sass said. “We only have local elections every other year, so every other year it’s on us to take care of the ballot, but most of our elections are state, so [the state] takes care of everything ballot wise.”

To advertise the newly-added ballot language access,, she installed large banners in town in both English and Vietnamese, notifying the community about the upcoming election. 

The real challenge, Sass said, was finding Vietnamese-speaking poll workers. Hiring poll workers is always difficult, Vietnamese-speaking ones even more so, she explained. Poll workers often work grueling 11-hour shifts, often for less than $10 an hour. 

While most poll workers tend to be elderly, students over the age of 16 can serve as poll workers too. In Randolph County, Sass contacted local schools to give Vietnamese-speaking students community service hours for volunteering as poll workers. 

As a final step in ensuring election day ran smoothly, Sass came up with a special system to make sure the Vietnamese poll worker connected with Vietnamese voters. At every check-in desk, she put cards that said “I need assistance” in both English and Vietnamese, so that English poll workers would know to direct the voter to the Vietnamese poll worker and both parties would be able to read the card’s message.

The hard work paid off. Sass said she’s heard from multiple Vietnamese voters who were very pleased with the recent change in ballots.

“It’s definitely not the easiest,” Sass said. “Anything we can do to get more voters participating,” she said, “[means] we’re doing well.”

Achieving true voter engagement, she said, often means going beyond legal requirements, relying on the passion of public officials and advocates to assess the needs of their own communities and spread the word. That means the effects of Section 203 can often look piecemeal, varying greatly from place to place.

But to Sun, the advocate in Philadelphia, even incremental progress is life-changing. 

“This is recognition. We are being seen, we belong to this country, welcome to vote, welcome to give our opinions on this country just like every other American,” Sun said.