| Week of September 29, 1996 | by F.R. Duplantier |
Naturalized American citizens are required to know English. Why, then, are they permitted to vote in their native tongues?"A nation noted for its diversity needs certain instruments of unity to keep the pluribus from overrunning the unum," says John Miller of the Heritage Foundation. "Our common citizenship is one such tool. Another, equally important, is the English language. It binds our multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious society together," says Miller. "Not everyone need speak English all of the time, but it must be the lingua franca of civic life. Since the voting booth is one of the vital places in which citizens directly participate in democracy, it must be the official language of the election process."
How did such an absurd practice as foreign-language voting get established? "The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed blacks the right to vote in places . . . where they had been systematically blocked from electoral participation," Miller recalls in the current issue of Policy Review. "After the Act's passage in 1965, civil rights groups toiled to expand its authority. When the law came up for reauthorization . . . Hispanic organizations argued that English-language ballots were the equivalent of literacy tests. People whose first language was Spanish needed special protections in order to vote, they claimed, citing low turnout among Hispanics. This was sheer quackery," says Miller. "Low Hispanic turnout was mainly due to the fact that so many Hispanics were not citizens and therefore ineligible to vote."
Congress considered the quackery politically expedient. "It required bilingual ballots in any political district where 'language minorities' made up at least five percent of the total population," Miller reminds us. "It also required that bilingual election materials be made available to voters in every county in which the language-minority population had an 'illiteracy rate' . . . above the national average." Having established a bad principle, Congress proceeded, in 1992, to expand the application of it to "counties with more than 10,000 residents who speak the same language and who are not proficient in English." This taxpayer-financed subsidy for politically-favored printers is most generous in Los Angeles County, where Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Tagalog ballots for three recent elections cost the county more than $1 million.
The enormous expense is not the main objection to foreign-language ballots. "Ballot initiatives are often worded very precisely," observes Miller. "Will translations always convey the exact English-language meaning of every initiative? In a deliberative democracy, they must," he insists. "More important, immigrant voters should not even need bilingual ballots. We have required naturalization applicants since 1907 to demonstrate English-language proficiency." Miller worries that "foreign-language voting sends one more message to immigrants that assimilation is not an important part of civil society."
What's to be done? The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would "repeal the federal government's unfunded bilingual ballot mandate," says John Miller. The next step is up to the Senate.
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