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Congressman Alcee Hastings (D., Fla.) denounced President Bush for spending so much time on Iraq while saying nothing about election reform. Congresswoman Carrie Meek (D., Fla.) added: "We know that Florida has been cheated [and] that this country has been cheated." Meek even urged the conference committee "not to look for a bipartisan thing that's going to please everybody." Congressman Bob Ney (R., Ohio), who is leading House Republicans on the election-reform conference committee, said that an agreement is near. He supported the Waters motion. Amid this pressure to finish their work, the conferees need to beware of the unintended consequences of election reform, especially in the area of bilingual ballots. The Bush Justice
Department team is already enforcing bilingual-voting requirements with
vigor. English-speaking poll workers are hard enough to find. As Congressman Clay Shaw (R., Fla.) noted during debate on Waters's motion, 150 poll workers failed to show up to work the Broward County polls last week. These Election Day jobs are poorly paid and often last from 6:00 A.M. until 11:00 P.M. In the interest of finding enough Spanish-speaking poll workers to comply with the Justice Department's mandates, Florida counties are unlikely to inquire too closely into a "bilingual" poll worker's English-language abilities. In fact, according to one Associated Press report, "in Miami-Dade, where the ballots were in English, Spanish and Creole, workers weren't even required to prove basic literacy." Currently, five percent of the population or 10,000 voters must speak another language in order to trigger bilingual ballots and bilingual-voting requirements for elections in particular place. Clinton Executive Order 13166 as interpreted by the Clinton Department of Justice and still untouched by the Bush administration, potentially reduces the bilingual-voting threshold from 10,000 people to just one person:
Should Clinton Executive Order 13166 ever be applied in a voting-rights context, multilingual-voting requirements will apply to every language in every election anywhere in the United States. Now, one of the reasons for Florida's election problems last week, according to the Miami Herald, was a "three-language Miami-Dade County ballot so lengthy that it belatedly required special computer programming." Imagine the potential for chaos, let alone partisan mischief, in an election where people must be allowed to vote in hundreds of languages upon demand. Unless the final election-reform legislation specifically states that E.O. 13166 does not apply to voter registration and voting procedures, every future election could include a festival of costly language litigation. And if the New York Times has its way, there will be plenty of such litigation. In a recent editorial, the Times urged that "[t]he [election reform] legislation should also instruct the Justice Department to enforce these mandates, and create a private right of action [emphasis added]." Thanks to the Supreme Court's 2001 ruling in Sandoval, private groups can no longer grow fat on attorney's fees by suing the government for perceived violations of civil rights laws. Should the election-reform bill restore the ability of private parties to drag communities into court over arguable interpretations of E.O. 13166, every election will take place under a threat of expensive lawsuits. Election-reform conferees, please take note: A bill which fails to address E.O.13166 and which includes a private right of action will guarantee that Florida's chaotic elections will be replicated throughout the nation. — Jim Boulet Jr. is executive director of English First. |
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n September
18, the issue of election reform took center stage in the U.S. House of
Representatives. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) offered a motion
to instruct House-Senate conferees to produce a compromise election-reform
bill by October 1. Her motion provoked a festival of demagoguery from
her fellow Democrats.
