Boosting Hispanic voters

 The Journal-News   Editorial   January 22, 2005 
Spanish-speaking voters in Westchester, at least, should have less difficulty in voting in future elections if the Westchester County Board of Elections follows an agreement reached with the U.S. Justice Department to provide:

? As many as three Spanish-speaking translators in each polling district in which a significant number of voters with Spanish surnames are enrolled, as well as proving bilingual telephone access in all election districts.

? Provide all printed election material in English and Spanish.

? Establish an advisory panel to assist the Board of Elections' outreach efforts.

The agreement resulted from reports by federal election monitors who visited polling places in Westchester during last November's election and found inadequate help for Spanish-speaking voters. Hispanics are the fastest-growing segment of Westchester's population. Federal monitors found that some Spanish-speaking voters were turned away because no one at their polling places spoke their language, and they were not even offered the required option of filling out an affidavit ballot.

Southern District U.S. Attorney David Kelley said that the settlement "demonstrates the federal government's commitment to ensure that all voters, including those with limited-English proficiency, are provided with legitimate and meaningful access to our electoral process."

As usual, the Board of Elections made excuses. Noting that the names of election inspectors for polling places are submitted to the board by local political party leaders, Democratic Elections Commissioner Reginald LaFayette said, "It's going to be very, very tough because we are not centralized, and we don't have control of the list coming over to us."

The advisory panel should help with that. There is certainly no shortage of Hispanic organizations in Westchester from which political leaders can draw.

Inadequate assistance for Spanish-speaking voters isn't the only Board of Elections shortcoming uncovered in the last election. The still-unresolved outcome in the 35th state Senate District race between incumbent Nicholas Spano and challenger Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Westchester County legislator, showed that Board of Elections inadequacies in training and just plain wrong instruction resulted in more than 600 ballots still uncounted and awaiting a court ruling. And who knows how many of those were cast by Hispanics?

Meanwhile, until the court decides the election outcome,the 35th District is unrepresented in the state Senate.

According to judicial rulings in the case so far, board instructions led poll inspectors to fill out the wrong ballot, and inadequate training of election inspectors had voters going to the wrong tables in the right polling place and even to the wrong polling place. With technology and even Internet voting in place elsewhere, there is no reason that election inspectors cannot have information at hand that will direct any voter to the right table in the right polling place.

Then there are disabled voters. A federal judge in November dismissed a lawsuit by disabled people charging that most of Westchester County's polling places are not completely accessible to the disabled. The suit was dismissed not on the merits of the case but because Westchester's six cities and 19 towns were not named as co-defendants. Westchester Disabled on the Move, the lead plaintiff, intends to re-file. It should. Disabled voters had filed the suit last March, asking the court to instruct the county to make all polling places compliant with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and to have the state provide voting machines that can be used by the visually impaired. That's not too much to ask, is it?

As the Westchester Board of Elections implements the agreement concerning Spanish-speaking voters, it should attend to its other inadequacies for all voters. In fact, so should all counties, not to mention the state itself.