The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“VOTING RIGHTS ACT REAUTHORIZATION” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S7902-S7905 on July 19, 2006.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
VOTING RIGHTS ACT REAUTHORIZATION
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, There are few things as critical to our Nation, and to American citizenship, as voting. Like the rights guaranteed by the first amendment, the right to vote is fundamental because it secures the effective exercise of all other rights. As people are able to register, vote, and elect candidates of their choice, their interests and rights get attention. The very legitimacy of our democratic Government is dependent on the access all Americans have to the electoral process.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 transformed the landscape of political inclusion. As amended, the act contains important provisions for language assistance. Section 203, added as part of the second reauthorization of the Voting Rights in 1975, broadened this landscape by allowing millions more American citizens to participate fully in our democracy. Section 203, which requires bilingual voting assistance for certain language minority groups, was enacted to remove obstacles to voting posed by illiteracy and lack of bilingual language assistance resulting in large measure from unequal educational opportunities available to minorities. These provisions helped overcome discriminatory barriers which limited access to the political process for language minority groups and resulted in low turnout and registration. Along with section 4(f)(4), section 203 has led to extraordinary gains in representation and participation made by Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans.
Hispanic-American populations have been one of the primary minority language groups to benefit from the protections of the bilingual provisions of the Voting Rights Act. For example, effective implementation of the bilingual provisions in San Diego County, CA, helped increase voter registration by more than 20 percent. And voter turnout among Hispanic Americans in New Mexico rose 26 percent between 2000 and 2004 after television and radio spots were aired in districts with Spanish-educated listeners about voter registration and absentee ballots. Yet more needs to be done. Historically, Hispanic Americans have low voter turnout and less than 1 percent of all elected offices in the United States are held by Hispanic Americans.
I was troubled during the immigration debate that the rhetoric of some Members of the Senate appeared to be anti-Hispanic in supporting the adoption of an English language amendment. Senator Salazar and I wrote to the President following up on this provision. We asked whether the President will continue to implement the language outreach policies of President Clinton's Executive Order No. 13166. A prompt and straightforward affirmative answer would have gone a long way. Sadly, we have received no response from this White House. I have, however, raised the matter when the opportunity presented itself with the Secretary of Commerce and the Attorney General and both have assured me that the Bush administration will continue to adhere to the outreach efforts of the Clinton Executive order.
I understand why those efforts to amend the immigration bill to make English the official or national language provoked a reaction and seemed mean-spirited to so many. It elicited the extraordinary May 19 letter from the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials Educational Fund, the National Council of La Raza and the National Puerto Rican Coalition and from a larger coalition of interested parties from 96 national and local organizations.
Until that vote, in our previous 230 years we had not found it necessary or wise to adopt English as our official or national language. I believe it was in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that the State legislature shortly after the Revolutionary War authorized official publication of Pennsylvania's laws in German as well as English to serve the German-speaking population of that State. We have been a confident Nation unafraid to hear expressions in a variety of languages and willing to reach out to all within our borders. That tradition is reflected in section 203 of the Voting Rights Act and in President Clinton's Executive Order No. 13166. It is an honorable and just tradition.
We demean our history and our welcoming tradition when we disparage languages other than English and those who speak them. I have spoken about our including Latin phrases on our official seal and the many States that include mottos and phrases in Latin, French and Spanish on their State flags. We need not fear other languages. We would do better to do more to encourage and assist those who wish to be citizens to learn English, but we should recognize English, as Senator Salazar's amendment suggested, as our common and unifying language.
I hope that the President will join with us to protect language minority voters. As a presidential candidate, then-Governor Bush told a New Hampshire audience in September 1999, ``English-only would mean to people `me, not you.' As the Washington Times noted recently:
Mr. Bush speaks some Spanish and occasionally peppers speeches and conversations with words and phrases from the language. Speaking to a group of adults taking civics lessons yesterday at the Catholic Charities-operated Juan Diego Center, he lapsed into Spanish. Asked whether Mr. Bush planned to drop Spanish from his stump speeches, a White House spokeswoman said she does not expect that to happen.
The White House, government agencies and a number of Senators include Spanish language outreach on their official government Web sites. I am glad that they do. Ironically, some who pushed most strongly for some variant of English-only treatment in the immigration bill have bent our rules to address the Senate in Spanish.
We have been engaged in a contentious debate about immigrants who are not yet citizens, which is unfortunate. I wish we could join together to pass fair and comprehensive immigration reform. But the issue related to section 203 and section 4(f)4 of the Voting Rights Act affects American citizens. These provisions provide assistance to Native Americans and indigenous peoples, who speak languages which preceded the first English speakers on this continent. These are citizens who are trying to vote but many of them are struggling with the English language due to disparities in education and the incremental process of learning. It is imperative that all citizens be able to exercise their rights as citizens, particularly a right as fundamental as the right to vote. Renewing the language provisions of the Voting Rights Act that are expiring and continue to be needed, will help make that a reality.
At this time I would like to summarize some of the evidence received by the Senate Judiciary Committee demonstrating the continuing need for sections 203 and 4(f)4.
We received extensive testimony about past and continuing educational disparities in jurisdictions covered by section 203 and section 4(f)4. According to multiple witnesses, many Alaska Natives, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans suffer from inadequate educational opportunities to learn English. Unfortunately, our Judiciary Committee record demonstrates that the high illiteracy rates experienced by language minorities result from the failure of State and local officials to afford equal educational opportunities.
Several witnesses testified that these educational disparities are the major form of discrimination against language minorities. John Trasvina, president of MALDEF, testified, ``while they may speak conversational English well, these U.S. citizens may not be fully proficient because they were intentionally denied the academic instruction necessary to vote effectively in English-only elections that employ complicated language and terminology.'' The problem of unequal educational opportunities existed before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and continues today. Language minority children who were educated in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and given unequal education opportunities are the adults that today need the assistance of sections 203 and 4(f)(4). Children who are in schools today where they receive unequal education will need the assistance of these provisions to fully participate in the political process as adults.
Over the course of nine hearings, we heard and received testimony that not only are all states with the most limited English proficient students covered by section 203, but all the school districts with most limited English proficient students are also covered by section 203. These children will first begin to vote over the next 25 years while this proposed reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act is in effect, and they will not have had equal access to education and the opportunity to learn English.
In Alaska, which has the single largest indigenous population in the United States, an attorney for Native American Rights Fund testified about the dramatic educational disparity between Native people and non-
Natives. Only 75 percent of all Alaska Natives completed high school compared to 90 percent of non-Natives. And still Alaska persists in holding all-English elections--in violation of section 203--which has impacted Alaska Natives' ability to vote with their turnout lagging behind statewide voter turnout by 17 percent.
According to the 2000 Census, the educational attainment of Hispanic Americans nationally is also lacking. Only 52.4 percent of all Hispanic Americans have a high school education or more, compared to 80.4 percent for all persons in the United States. Efforts to combat this educational disparity have resulted in dozens of lawsuits against states for failing to provide equal education to native and nonnative English speakers. We received testimony that successful school funding cases have been brought in half of all the section 203 covered States and are pending in many others. In Arizona in 2005, a Federal court cited the State of Arizona for contempt for failing over the course of the preceding 13 years to provide opportunities for Spanish-language students to learn English in the public schools. The court has been fining the State at least $500,000 a day until the problem is corrected and equal opportunities are provided to the 175,000 English language learner students estimated to be in Arizona's schools in 2006.
And I personally understand the challenges of learning English as your second language. As I have said before, my wife was born of immigrant parents and English became her second language. My mother was born of immigrant parents, with English as her second language. Fortunately, they learned it as young people. But for adults learning English, it can be much harder.
We received extensive testimony that classes for adult students to increase their English proficiency are too few and oversubscribed. Senator Kennedy told us that in his own section 203 covered jurisdiction of Boston, the waiting period for English as a second language, ESL, classes is 17,000 students long which translates into a wait of as much as 3 years. In New York City, the ESL need is estimated to be 1 million, but only 41,347 adults were able to enroll in 2005 because of limited availability. It is a sad fact that most adult ESL programs no longer keep waiting lists because of the extreme demand, but use lotteries in which at least 75 percent are turned away, and the waiting time can be several years.
Continuing acts of discrimination against language minorities, such as those contained in the committee record, chill minority voting participation denying these citizens equal access to the balloting process. We heard countless examples of the continuing discrimination that minority language citizens face when participating or attempting to participate in the political process. These experiences will no doubt stick with each voter for some time.
Civil Rights organizations testified about numerous instances of discrimination that were documented while monitoring elections in covered jurisdictions in New York. For example, in the 2001 elections at Public School 228, a polling site coordinator, trying to thwart bilingual interpreters from performing their duties, yelled ``You f---
ing Chinese, there's too many of you!'' In 2002, at Public School 82 and at the Botanical Garden, some of the comments made to Asian-
American voters included poll workers calling South Asian voters
``terrorists'' and mocking the physical features of Asian eyes. While monitoring the 2003 elections, independent observers reported that in Public School 126 in Manhattan's Chinatown, poll inspectors ridiculed a voter's surname--Ho; in Public School 115 in Queens, disparaging remarks were directed at South Asian voters, with one coordinator continuously referring to herself as a ``U.S. citizen'' and that she, unlike them, was ``born here'' and that the other workers needed to
``keep an eye'' on all South Asian voters; at Flushing Bland Center in Queens, the site coordinator complained that Asian-American voters
``should learn to speak English.''
During the 2004 election, a Hispanic voter in San Antonio, TX, was told by an election judge that she was not on a voter registration list and could not cast a provisional ballot, despite the recently enacted Help America Vote Act which provides for provisional ballots in such situations. She and her family had been voting at the same polling station for over 20 years. The election judge refused to unlock the provisional ballot box until a Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund--MALDEF--attorney arrived and negotiated on behalf of the voter.
And the House of Representatives received equally disturbing testimony which was incorporated into our own Record. In 2003, the chairman of the Texas House Redistricting Committee stated that he did not intend to hold redistricting hearings in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where many U.S. citizens are limited English proficient Spanish speakers, because only two members of the Redistricting Committee spoke Spanish. Chairman Crabb stated that the members of the committee who did not speak Spanish ``would have a very difficult time if we were out in an area other than Austin or other English speaking areas to be able to have committee hearings to be able to converse with the people that did not speak English.'' Many citizens living in areas of Texas with high concentrations of limited English proficient citizens would have been excluded from participating in local Redistricting Committee hearings had Hispanic advocates not interceded on their behalf. In another part of the country, due to a lack of sufficient bilingual ballots, Hispanic voters in Pima County, AZ, were forced to crowd around one translated poster of more than a dozen initiatives left in a poorly lit area during the 2004 elections.
Sadly, these examples are not isolated incidents of discrimination. Assistant Attorney General Wan Kim testified that the Department of Justice has brought more lawsuits to enforce the language minority provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the previous 5 years than in all previous years combined. These facts and all the other testimony we received in Committee clearly demonstrate the ongoing need for section 203's protections and the need that we reauthorize these provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Of course there are critics. There are critics who say that the language assistance provisions in the Voting Rights Act should be eliminated entirely because immigrants must learn English to pass the citizenship test and therefore should be able to vote in English. This argument is unsound for two reasons.
First, we received overwhelming testimony that the level of English proficiency required to pass a citizenship test does not approach the level of proficiency required to register to vote or to understand ballot measures. Naturalization requires a third or fourth grade knowledge of English. Sample test sentences on the Immigration and Naturalization Services Web site reveal that no sentence is more than 10 words long and most are seven or less, containing one or two syllable words. In addition, most candidates for citizenship are exempt from the English language requirements of the citizenship test because they are over the age of 50. Between 1986 and 2004, 9,055,732 people were naturalized of which 4,925,553 or 54 percent were over the age of 50.
Voting requires English proficiency at levels much higher than the citizenship test. A survey of voter registration materials reported on the Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, admitted into our Record, found the English grade level of the materials just to register to vote was much higher than third or fourth grade knowledge. In Texas, a ``covered jurisdiction'' for section 203 purposes, the voter registration material required nearly a twelfth grade English comprehension for completion with an average of 21 words per sentence. The situation is similar in Arizona--ninth grade level with 15 words per sentence--California, college freshman level with 22 words per sentence, and New Mexico, twelfth grade level with 19 words per sentence. This survey only covers materials required to register to vote. We also heard testimony about the complexity of actually casting votes on ballot initiatives and directions to operate voting machines as examples of other English language barriers to language minority voters. Ballot initiatives are often long and complicated requiring high school level education or higher. Deborah Wright, Acting Assistant Registrar-Recorder and County Clerk for Los Angeles County, testified that written translations are provided in L.A. County because of the complex nature of the issues facing the voters in that state.
Complex ballots are not limited to California. We received evidence of numerous examples. Perhaps the one that struck me the most was a 2004 Fargo, ND, election ballot, where a single question concerning tax increases for infrastructure improvement was one sentence which contained 150 words written at the graduate school level.
Second, most language minorities protected by the Voting Rights Act are United States citizens by birth. The vast majority of language minorities are not immigrants. In fact, 3.4 million of the 4.5 million language minority students in the public schools are native-born U.S. citizens. Hispanic Americans are the single largest minority group covered by Sections 203 and 4(f)(4). According to 2000 Census data, 84.2 percent of all Hispanic American citizens in the United States were born here. Nearly half of the 11.9 million Asian Americans citizens in the United States were born here. Further, 98.6 percent of all Puerto Rican persons in the United States are native born and the language of Puerto Rican public schools is Spanish with English taught as a subject.
The committee received testimony that although there are costs associated with implementing the minority language assistance provisions, they are reasonable. Los Angeles, the largest and most diverse local election jurisdiction in the United States, provides assistance to voters in six languages other than English, and its compliance with section 203 requirements costs 10 percent or less of its annual election budget. And the Secretary of State for New Mexico testified before the House Judiciary Committee characterizing the costs of complying with section 203 as, ``a minimal cost to the State of New Mexico.''
One witness testified that she believed the costs of section 203 to be extremely burdensome. Linda Chavez, president of One Nation Indivisible, testified that Los Angeles County spent $3.3 million in 2002 to comply with section 203, which she thought was too much to ask the County to bear. However, as Deborah Wright's testimony on behalf of Los Angeles County made clear this number is a small percentage of the overall election budget, and is proportional to the 12.9 million limited English proficient voters in her jurisdiction. Ms. Chavez also alleged that ``[f]requently the cost of multilingual voter assistance is more than half of a jurisdiction's total election costs,'' citing a 1997 General Accounting Office report. However, a close look at that GAO report shows that only 3 out of the 34 jurisdictions surveyed spent over 50 percent of their total election budget on multilingual voter assistance. Contrary to Ms. Chavez's testimony, the report reveals that the costs of providing language assistance made up, on average, a little over 10 percent of total expenditures. Ensuring full access to American's right to vote certainly is worth this reasonable cost.
For jurisdictions that struggle with the costs of implementing sections 203 or 4(f)(4), the Department of Justice, DOJ, provides commendable assistance in managing the costs. Acting Assistant Attorney General Bradley Schlozman testified that ``the Civil Rights Division recognizes, of course, that States and municipalities do not have unlimited budgets, and we have thus designed our enforcement strategy to minimize unnecessary costs for local election officials.''
The DOJ urges covered jurisdictions to avoid costly and unhelpful expenditures such as publishing Spanish language notices in English language newspapers that are not read by those who rely on the Spanish language. Election officials are encouraged to identify the most effective and efficient channels of communication that are used by private enterprise, service providers, tribal governments, and the like to get information effectively to the language minority community at low cost.
The DOJ also encourages the use of fax and e-mail ``information trees,'' whereby bilingual election notices are sent at no cost to a wide array of businesses, unions, social and fraternal organizations, service providers, churches and other organizations with a request that these entities make announcements or otherwise disseminate the information to their membership's language minority voters. And the DOJ has incorporated ``best practices'' from around the country to help jurisdictions recruit sufficient numbers of bilingual poll workers. As a consequence of the testimony submitted on costs of implementation, we determined that costs are both reasonable and manageable.
There has been some discussion about allegations that in some jurisdictions no one uses the translated materials, but we also received hard research showing that limited English proficient citizens utilize the written and oral assistance offered in jurisdictions, but must be made aware it exists. According to a November 2000 exit survey of language minority voters in Los Angeles and Orange Counties in California, 54 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander voters and 46 percent of Hispanic voters reported that they would be more likely to vote if they received language assistance. These numbers are consistent with other exit surveys done in the same counties in March 2000 and November 1998.
Examples of ``low use'' of bilingual election materials are not evidence that bilingual materials are not needed. ``Low use'' more likely suggests that a jurisdiction is not conducting sufficient outreach to the communities that would most benefit. In a survey of 810 section 203 covered jurisdictions, nearly two-thirds of election officials admitted they do not engage in community outreach to covered language groups. How are people supposed to know the help is there, if there is no community outreach? We can, and we must do better.
I am nonetheless happy to report, that when sufficient outreach to language minorities is accomplished, materials are being used to assist in voting according to evidence received in Committee. In the 1990 general election, bilingual assistance was used by 25 percent of Hispanic voters in the State of Texas, and 18 percent of Hispanic voters in the State of California. In the 1988 general election, bilingual assistance was used by 20 percent of Hispanic voters in the State of New Mexico, 19 percent of Hispanic voters in the State of Texas, and 10 percent of Hispanic voters in the State of California.
Being from a small state, I know the importance and the power of community involvement, but perhaps the best evidence we heard that shows the power of community outreach was the experience of Chinese-
American voters in King County, WA, which includes the city of Seattle. One witness who urged an opt-out provision in section 203 for low use cited King County's experience in 2000, the first year it became a covered jurisdiction for voters who speak Chinese. That year, according to the witness, only 24 Chinese ballots were used, demonstrating that ballots were not needed. But that is not the full story. The real story is that after that election, officials in King County worked with Chinese-American community organizations and increased the publicity about the availability of bilingual election materials. In 2005, the number of requested Chinese ballots increased by more than 5,800 percent. It shows the power of community outreach cannot be overstated.
Much has been made by some witnesses in committee, and even in the press, that any provision of bilingual election materials contribute to the balkanization of American society. Research offered in committee shows this allegation to be faulty. On the contrary, making bilingual election materials available has encouraged more language minorities to participate in all political aspects of American society. After the section 203 coverage was expanded to include a numeric trigger during the last reauthorization, the number of Asian Americans registered to vote increased dramatically. Between 1996 and 2004, Asian Americans had the highest increase of new voter registration--58.7 percent. And we received testimony that in districts where the Department of Justice has conducted enforcement ensuring bilingual election materials, participation not only in voting but in running for political office has increased. After an enforcement proceeding in Harris County, TX, the Vietnamese-American voter turnout doubled, and the first Vietnamese-American candidate in history, Hubert Vo, was elected to the Texas Legislature--defeating the incumbent chair of the Appropriations Committee by 16 votes out of over 40,000 cast.
These voting rights provisions work--they tell new citizens and citizens by birth who may not always feel they are afforded all of the opportunities they deserve that they are welcome to join our political process. They help new citizens and first time voters to overcome cultural differences which further contribute to disenfranchisement for limited English proficient citizens who are often unfamiliar with the American voting process and do not know about registration, referenda and voting machines. The charge of ``balkanization,'' as one witness put it is ``a loaded term of mythical proportions that has absolutely no basis in fact, and is used as a divisive measure.'' Based on the evidence we received, it is clear that the provisions of Sections 203 and 4(f)(4) have led to increased participation and representation. These provisions, that caused significant problems in the House of Representatives, have enabled language minorities to overcome what are tantamount to literacy tests at the polling place so that they can access their fundamental right to vote. Section 203 and section 4(f)4 of the Voting Rights Act must be reauthorized.
____________________
