Clerk defends spanish ballots as helping voters

By Hasso Hering
Albany Democrat-Herald   15 May 2005
  

Steve Druckenmiller, the Linn County clerk, has been surprised but undaunted by public reaction against his plan to offer ballots in Spanish next year.

"Voting is a right, and my job is to help people," he said from his office at the Linn County Courthouse on Friday.

He didn't really want to go into the details of the reaction, saying only that he's had some that was positive but more that was negative.

Some of the negative reaction he attributed to resentment of illegal aliens and the notion, unwarranted in his view, that his plan had anything to do with them.

Druckenmiller announced Wednesday that he planned to offer Spanish-language ballots to registered voters who ask for them starting in the primary election in May 2006.

He's the first of the state's 36 county clerks to take that step, though other election information in Spanish has been published by the state Elections Division for some time.

In an e-mail letter to the Democrat-Herald, one Linn County resident said she would not vote for Druckenmiller again.

He's in the middle of his latest four-year term and plans to run again in 2006. He has worked in Linn County elections since 1984, was elected clerk, succeeding Del Riley, in 1986, and has been re-elected every four years since.

His plan is to prepare Spanish-language ballots on ordinary copy paper ? not the more expensive stock used for official ballots ? and provide them to voters who ask for them.

The county elections staff then will transcribe votes on those ballots onto regular ballots for counting by machines. Something like this is done routinely for people who have trouble reading the official ballot, or who ask the elections staff for help in other ways, the clerk said.

Druckenmiller acknowledged that immigrants usually must pass an English test as part of becoming a citizen eligible to vote. But he said he knows of legal citizens who are not that proficient in English and who would be more comfortable if they could read ballot measures, with their convoluted phrases, in their native tongue.

He has not yet worked out the details. One of the things that needs to be arranged is who will translate ballot measures into Spanish, and whether and how the translated text will get some kind of official seal of approval.

The English text of ballot measures often is the subject of legal battles over the nuances of this noun or that conjunction or verb before a court-approved version ends up on the ballot.

The legal implication of changing the approved text into another language is something that has yet to be worked out.

The Linn clerk hopes to get translation help from Spanish-language teachers at Oregon State University and Linn-Benton Community College.

As for the cost of his plan, Druckenmiller said it would be minimal, amounting only to the price of copy paper for the Spanish ballots.

As registered voters, people asking for Spanish ballots would be getting a regular ballot anyway, so there's no additional cost, he pointed out.

He plans to carry out his plan in the primary and general elections next year, then evaluate how it worked out.

As for the negative reaction he received, the clerk was taken aback.

"It's a little surprising," he said. "We're not changing the world. This is not a crusade."