Posted on: March 8th, 2006
Filed Under: [ Commentary ]
“A democracy has many voices. Since it may also have a wide variety of immigrants, as the U.S. does, the government should speak to its citizens in their own languages. This logic led to a Spanish response to the president’s State of the Union Address last month. It’s also the logic behind multilingual ballots: Citizens should be able to vote in their own languages. But the multilingual logic is a poor expression of what it means to live in a democratic society.
The multilingual-ballots requirement was amended to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) when the act was reauthorized in 1975, and it has remained law since then (the act was reauthorized again in 1982). Along with other key elements, minority-language provisions will expire in 2007, and Congress is now considering whether to reauthorize them. Fifty-six members of the House of Representatives recently asked the chairman of the Judiciary Committee to fight the renewal of multilingual ballots. But judging by the mood in the House hearings on VRA reauthorization, and the influence of reports like the one recently released by the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act, multilingual voting won’t be going away anytime soon. “
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