Senate Elections,
Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments Committee
Federal Voting Rights Act
SENATOR DEBRA BOWEN: --even allowing for the
differences in watches between some parts of
I’m
Senator Debra Bowen, the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment,
and Constitutional Amendments Committee.
This is an issue, the Federal Voting Rights Act issue, that was raised
most recently by a group of people who were celebrating the work of the freedom
writers in the 1960s. they were at a
luncheon at Loyola Marymount University and a discussion began about the
Federal Voting Rights Act and at that point, I decided it would be a good idea
for all of us in California to become more educated about the 1965 Federal
Voting Rights Act, if you will, which was intended to insure that the 15th
Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees a person’s right to vote is not
denied or abridged based on race, color, or previous condition of
servitude. And the Federal Voting Rights
Act is intended to enforce that provision of the Constitution.
Much
of it is permanent, but there are a number of provisions that will expire in
2007 unless Congress affirmatively moves to reenact them. So what we will talk about today is the
significance of those provisions that are up for reenactment, what they mean to
To
make this subject matter more manageable, I have broken the agenda into four
pieces, and at the end of the scheduled panels, we will take testimony from any
member of the public who would like to testify.
If you would not mind signing up on the list that the Senate Sergeants
have, that will just help us make sure we have allocated enough time to receive
comments.
And
with that, let me first call up our panel consisting of Robert Rubin, Kathay
Feng, and Margo Reeg. This is—I was
going to call it the lawyers’ panel, but it’s really broader than that. This is the panel that will lay our
groundwork, provide us for an introduction on the Voting Rights Act and some of
the legal issues. Let me begin with Mr.
Rubin if I might. _____ think.
MR. ROBERT RUBIN: I’ll thank you again after you know, mike is
on.
SENATOR BOWEN: And I know the vents system is loud in this
room. Can you all in the back hear? Yes?
Okay, good. Then it’s better back
there than it is up here, apparently. If
anybody’s having trouble hearing, just please let one of our sergeants know and
we—feedback is the breakfast of champions.
Without knowing whether or not you can hear, we can’t make adjustments
to make sure that everything is audible.
Alright, now let’s try that again.
MR. RUBIN: Thank you.
And again, I am Robert Rubin, the legal director of the Lawyers
Committee for Civil Rights in
Whether
it involves the photo identification requirements in
I
think it’s also an auspicious time to be conducting these hearings because of
late, we have heard noise from two of the four Section V covered counties. Of course, you know, in
And
so I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the things that we have done
over the course of the years that show how important it is that those
provisions do remain. As the chairperson
may be aware, we brought and prevailed on two United States Supreme Court cases
in
There
have been letters of objection also in Monterey County in the Chular Union
Elementary School District, a school district that had almost 75 percent Latino
student population, yet even then when the school district proposed to
converting from a district to an at large system, and typically when you have
over 50 percent overall minority population which is of course, no longer an
minority, at large elections don’t tend to dilute votes quite as much. Even there, because of the way the county
populace had manipulated the vote and engaged in racially polarized efforts,
the Justice Department issued its letter of objection under Section V which of
course, prevents any change from going into effect. Section V prevents any voting practice or
policy from going into effect until it has been approved by the Department of
Justice or until a federal court has issued a declaratory judgment.
In another
example of the efficacy of Section V, in the 2003 gubernatorial recall
election, we, together with MALDEF and other civil rights organizations, were
engaged in litigation in Monterey County and other Section V counties,
challenging their principally the elimination of voting precincts. Now some might question why is that such a
big deal? Well, it’s a bid deal because
for disabled, for elderly, for the poor who do not own cars having to travel
five miles instead of being able to walk across the street to your school house
where your precinct has typically been, is a big deal. And that’s what
We
obtained a restraining order in that case, although of course, we’re well aware
the gubernatorial election did take place and everything that has happened
since did ensue. The elimination of
those polling places was stopped and those polling places were restored as a
direct result of effective implementation of Section V. So again, another example of the efficacy of
Section V. It doesn’t necessarily stop
elections, though sometimes it can, but what it does do is that is shifts what the
Supreme Court called the burden of time and inertia from the perpetrators of
the evil, from the victims of the evil, to the perpetrators of the evil. And that is so that for example, in the deep
south, when
The last
area that I’ll mention is actually not involving the Federal Voting Rights Act,
but it points the importance of the Federal Voting Rights Act. As the chairperson is undoubtedly aware, the
California Legislature in 2001 passed something we call the California Voting
Rights Act. And it is modeled
principally on Section II of the Federal Voting Rights Act although it
eliminates the compactness requirement.
That is one does not need to demonstrate a 50+ percent district in order
to get a remedy. You can show what we
call influence districts. That is a
district in which there might be 35 or 40 percent of a minority population that
together with crossover voting from traditional Anglo voters and other
crossover votes, they have an ability to influence and perhaps even ability to
elect their candidates of choice.
We
have filed two cases there. One is in
the California Court of Appeal in an instance where the constitutionality of
the law passed by this Legislature is being challenged. We believe that the law is
constitutional. The City of
SENATOR BOWEN: On what grounds?
MR. RUBIN: That it is a racial classification, because it
prevents discrimination on the basis of race.
And if you raise an eyebrow to that, it’s understandable, we don’t
really quite understand the difference between what you all did in the
California Voting Rights Act and what federal and state legislatures have been
doing for decades in terms of outlawing racial discrimination. But, a Superior Court Judge in
SENATOR BOWEN: And this is the City of
MR. RUBIN: The City of
In
the second case which is against the Hanford School Board, that case was
successfully settled. And again, it’s
another good example of the efficacy of Section V, because having Section V
there ensured that once the school district agreed to convert its election
system from an at large to a district system, the manner in which it would
district the school board elections would have to be what is called
non-retrogressive. That is not that the
minority community would not be worse off than it was before and that was a
serious stick that we had in getting the kinds of fair districts in
And
so why is this relevant to reauthorization?
Because as I noted earlier,
SENATOR BOWEN: Can you explain the legal process for the
bailout?
MR. RUBIN: It’s complicated. Essentially what a jurisdiction would need to
show, and a jurisdiction, of course, in
So it
is essential that this body send a clear message to Congress that the
protections of Section V and the Voting Rights Act are not confined to, the
importance of them is not confined to
Let
me just close quickly with a vignette about the importance of voting rights
protections. My clients in the
After
the decisive hearing at which we had achieved our goals, he pulled me aside and
told me how difficult it was for him to even speak publicly. He told me that growing up he was told to
keep his head down, his mouth shut, and to mind his own business. But, emboldened by the protections of the
Voting Rights Act, he stood up and challenged the school board in
So
you see there from the United States Code esoteric provisions that we talked
about in terms of bail out down to the grassroots community level, the impact
that the voting rights has. So don’t
kick the chair out from under Richard Leon.
Please be sure that the legal foundation for the Voting Rights Act for
African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians stays in place so as this state embarks
on being a majority minority state, we keep the promise that the ability of
those respective minority communities to elect candidates of their choice
through utilization of fair electoral practices is not compromised. Thank you very much.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
Let me turn to Ms. Feng.
MS. KATHAY FENG: Thank you, Senator Bowen and Senator Joseph
Dunn, for the opportunity to speak before you.
My name is Kathay Feng and I’m the executive director of California
Common Cause. And we’re a state
organization of 35,000 members dedicated to holding power accountable.
Prior
to joining Common Cause, I was also a voting rights attorney at the Asian
Pacific American Legal Center for over seven years where we engaged very
actively in protecting the Voting Rights Act in particular ensuring that the
bilingual provisions, requirements of the Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act
were fully applied in those counties that were required to provide assistance
in Asian languages.
And
so what I’d also like to do is like Robert, I provided written comments and
it’s all there, but I’d like to give a quick synopsis of it. Wanted to talk about, I think, to start out
with I think one of the most poignant examples of the type of discrimination
that still goes on in our poll sites.
When we think of the Voting Rights Act, a lot of times the picture or
the images that come up are black and white, something that happened in the
south, something that was in the 60s. It’s
a thing of the past. And certainly many
of the people who would argue that the Voting Rights Act sections should not be
renewed say discrimination was thing of the past. We’ve solved all our problems and we don’t
need any new laws to continue protecting traditionally disenfranchised voters
from being denied the vote. And that
story is that in a recent presidential election where I was poll monitor, I
went to a lot of poll sites where there were a lot of people voting who didn’t
speak English as their first language.
Many of them do speak English, but you know, the ability to speak
English well enough to be able to understand a proposition, well enough to be
able to understand Prop. 80 or 79 or name them, is a very challenging
task. And especially if it’s their first
time voting, walking into a poll site can be very challenging because it’s the
first time that they may be casting a ballot.
So knowing how to insert a ballot into the machine, knowing how to punch
it correctly or mark it correctly, knowing how to appropriately pull it out and
give it to the poll worker, that’s all an intimidating thing, because for many
people, the first time that they’ve ever done it.
And I
went to a poll site where there was a long line. It was in a senior citizen center. Many people were of Asian-American background
and they were really excited because it was a presidential election, and so
they got to vote for the first time around a really hot election. And so there was a certain excitement in the
air. People talking about how they were
going to vote. And what I noticed was
that the line was moving very slowly, because when people got to the front of
the line, they were trying to communicate their name, and because some of them
spoke with accents, their names were Asian and maybe not familiar to the poll
workers and they were a little bit nervous.
They were taking a little bit longer than people who have voted
regularly.
The
poll inspector, the person who headed up that poll site decided to stand up and
announce in a very loud voice, “Everybody who doesn’t speak English, I need you
to go to the back of the line. Back of
the line, right now, so we can help the normal voters.” Imagine is this is the first time that you
are voting being sent to the back of the line, the humiliation that you feel,
the message that it sends to you that you are not equal, the message that it
sends that your vote doesn’t matter, the feeling that you are less than a
citizen. And many people were on the
verge of tears. They had never been
treated this way and they had fought so hard to become citizens of the
That’s
a story that has a positive outcome, which is that because of the Voting Rights
Act and the monitoring like groups like the Asian Pacific American Legal Center
does, we were able to immediately contact L.A. County, let them know about the
incident, and have those folks counseled and then have additional poll workers
brought in to be able to assist the people who were trying to vote. And really, the key thing about the Voting
Rights Act is making sure that everybody who shows up to vote who is
legitimately allowed to vote has full access to the ballot. That when they’re casting a ballot, they’re
voting the way that they had intended to, and that it’s recorded
accurately.
Wanted
to talk very quickly about some other areas that we might not think of when we
think about the impact of the Voting Rights Act. One is that, you know, in November of 2000,
we had a very controversial election that opened America’s eyes to the kinds of
election irregularities that could happen, sometimes county to county with
different regulations, sometimes machines that were malfunctioning, sometimes
poll workers who were turning people away because of the way they looked or
because their name had been removed from the polls, from the poll lists without
any strong standards. And one of the
things that came up very clearly was that we learned a whole new vocabulary
around things like chads and butterfly ballots and that chads could be
pregnant, and that the machines we had assumed, punch card machines, that we
had assumed were widely reliable were in fact highly unreliable. And in
Using
the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, we were actually able
to sue the State of
An
additional example, the Help America Vote Act, passed in the wake of the
debacle in 2000, required a lot of new provisions, some of them, for instance,
the change to new voting machines from punch card voting, requiring that there
be a statewide database of registered voters, requiring that there be standards
for whose name gets purged and notifying voters before they get purged. Requiring that certain new voters present
voter I.D. or in some way or another, affirm that they were who they were. And requiring that counties develop
standardized process for provisional voting and other types of voting, so that
there was not a difference within a state.
All
of those types of requirements under the Help America Vote Act are implicated
by the Voting Rights Act. And California
had to come up with a state plan that would outline what we would do in
implementing the Help America Vote Act, and it was very much informed by the
notion that we had to make sure that in implementing the Help American Vote Act
that we were not inadvertently having a disproportionate impact on minority
communities or language minority communities.
And as a result, as I outlined in my written testimony, there are a lot
of aspects of
And
finally I would just mention redistricting.
We just went through a very heated election around whether or not redistricting,
the redistricting process should be changed and removed from the hands of
legislators and put into an independent redistricting commission. But, one of the key questions is to what
extent as we change the lines each decade, do we need to continue respecting the
Voting Rights Act? Without a strong
Voting Rights Act protection, concepts like protection of traditionally
disenfranchised minority voters and communities of interest would not
exist. And so we, like many of our
colleagues who will be speaking here today, want to strongly urge that the Voting
Rights Act has had a very meaningful impact for
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
MS. MARGO REEG: Good morning. My name is Margo Reeg. I am representing the League of Women Voters
of California. I am actually the
president of the L.A. County League of Women Voters which is an organization of
13 Leagues within
The
League of Women Voters since its founding in 1920 had protecting and promoting
the right of citizens to vote as a guiding principle of the organization. The Voting Rights Act, widely considered one
of the most successful civil rights laws in our county has institutionalized
that principle by outlawing discriminatory practices in elections and
protecting the rights of minority voters.
The League of Women Voters urges you to strongly support the
reauthorization and the renewal of the expiring provisions of the landmark
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The
League has been involved in many voting rights issues over the last 35
years. We advocated strongly for
amendments to the Voting Rights Act to extend it and to expand its coverage to
include language minorities. The League
was the leader in the fight to strengthen the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and to
extend the major provisions for 25 years, which will be up ‘til 2007. And we worked enthusiastically in 1992 for
the reauthorization of the language assistance requirements that are so
important in
The
League has worked effectively to oppose amendments to weaken Section V, which
applies, as Robert said, to four counties within
Since
then, the League has been heavily involved in helping write and pass the Motor
Voter law to make voter registration available to people in all states with, to
facilitate voter registration to make it as simple and easy as possible. We have opposed voter I.D. requirements and
other restrictions that would negatively impact on minority communities
specifically. And the League has been,
as a result of the broadening of the voting rights to language minorities and
providing election materials to language minorities, we have been proactive in
providing election education materials both on our smart voter site, which has
been operative since 1996. It has voter
lookup, polling place lookup facility, information about all the statewide
ballot measures, information about federal, state, and local candidates, and as
many links as possible are placed in at least Spanish to facilitate that access
by all voters.
In
addition, we’ve been involved with the Easy Voter Guide which in its first production
was called the Easy Reading Voter Guide.
The, it was designed to help literacy challenged adults, English learners
and other underserved Californians become informed voters. This began in 1994 as a State Library project
and has been operated by the League and other organizations since then. The Easy Voter Guide is published in Spanish,
Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean, in additional to literacy level English, and
is distributed by the League and other organizations and libraries throughout
And
the League was heavily involved in the Help America Vote Act writing to make
sure that the provisions were both strong in requiring all states to provide
broad access to the ballot for people and to find strict requirements for
voting equipment and voting database and so forth. More recently, the League has been involved
both on the national level with the coalition organized by leadership
Conference on Civil Rights to promote the reauthorization of the Voting Rights
Act and has also been a member involved with the California Voter Empowerment
Circle in dealing with not only the Voting Rights Act reauthorization project
which we’re currently working on, but also other issues of voting
accessibility.
And
on a personal note, I’ve been a poll worker since 1990 and a polling place
inspector and my most recent job was polling place inspector at the early
voting site in
And
I’ve also worked at Braille Institute where we have used the touch screen
voting machines with the audio and keyboard capability to facilitate blind and
disabled voters voting independently on their own for the first time and it is
just really exciting to see how thrilled they are to be able to do this.
So
the Voting Rights Act is something that also applies to bringing voting to
every citizen and making it as accessible as possible. And that is why the League of Women Voters
firmly advocates for reauthorization of Section V and Section 203 of the Voting
Rights Act without changes, unless those changes would strengthen the law to
enfranchise more voters, provide for a more representative government, or give
additional protection to the rights of minority voters. And in
SENATOR BOWEN: I do have one, one question for the panelist
having to do with Section V. In a recent
Newsweek article a writer noted that
with regard to the preclearance provisions that they are still identified by a
formula on minority participation in elections more than three decades
ago. And the results are weird.
But,
in looking just at the four counties in
MR. RUBIN: It may make some sense, but before we talk
about changes, I’d like to, you know, just make sure that we all understand why
those four counties are covered in the first place. There are essentially two triggers for
Section V coverage. One is whether
there’s a discriminatory test or device in effect and what was in effect then
was a state literacy test. And the
second is voter participation in the 1968 presidential election, if it dropped
below 50 percent of registered voters, then that was an indicia of the
discriminatory device chilling the interest of voters to participate, because
that was such a low threshold.
So,
it’s not, I mean properly understood, I guess I would say it’s not so weird,
although what George Will thinks is weird I often think is, you know,
completely common sense. Someone
____. Although he says it much better
than I ever could, even if we disagree on the substance. So, should, not to completely dodge your
question, should it be updated? I think
that there probably could be, you know, a fresh look at some of the formula
coverage. However, I think that our
experience is at least in two of the four covered counties, and those are Kings
and
SENATOR BOWEN: Well, I think you’re assuming my question goes
in a particular direction in terms of the reform. It was not meant to imply that perhaps we
should narrow the preclearance jurisdictions.
It was intended more to inquire whether a different set of criteria
might be more accurate under current circumstances and could result in some
jurisdictions that are not currently covered being covered, as well as the
other way. And I think about what’s
happened in the last 30 years, and it’s hard for me to imagine that we have
picked all of the places where there are discriminatory practices based on
those two tests.
MR. RUBIN: Sure. I
think that’s a very fair comment, and the only thing that we would urge this body
to the extent that it is attempting to influence the Congress is that whatever
be done, be done on a full record, because there have been some poison pills
proposed along the way here, such that why don’t we make Section V coverage
national? Why don’t we make it
permanent? And the problem with just
summarily doing something like that is that as the United States Supreme Court
has said repeatedly, Congress only has power to do so much. And that is typically restrictive and
Congress does not have a full record upon which it would act. And so when I talk about the poison pill,
some I think were trying to lead members of the civil rights community down the
primrose path by saying, well, you know, as you were suggesting, you know, why
don’t we just make it, you know, I guess you weren’t suggesting universal, but
some were suggesting universal or broader.
And my point is simply that however broader it be made and certainly if
it’s made universal, I think universal would be extremely problematic. I don’t think the Supreme Court would uphold
the statute. And that would be a
devastating blow to civil rights to have the Voting Rights Act declared
unconstitutional.
SENATOR BOWEN: Senator Dunn.
SENATOR DUNN: You mentioned a poison pill and you just
described one of them from your perspective.
Are there other poison pills that you see are out there at the federal
level in this discussion? At that level,
I’d just be curious.
MR. RUBIN: Well, yeah, I mean, I’ll defer on Section 203,
I think there are issues. The other one
that I think I just briefly mentioned is permanency. And again, that seems to be something that
the court has relied on in upholding at least implicitly, the constitutionality
of Section V is that it’s constantly looked at and reauthorized and reexamined
to ensure that it is current.
SENATOR DUNN: Though a proposal of permanency would be a
poison pill from your perspective.
MR. RUBIN: I think so.
I would be very, very concerned that the Supreme Court is currently made
and as well as it may be made up in the coming weeks and months, would find
that an unauthorized extension of Congressional power that is not authorized
under the Constitution. And that’s
principally, as I’m sure you all are aware where the Supreme Court has really
been cutting back on Congressional power.
And even in the most obvious of instances, they’re insisting on finding
a federal nexus, so that even when you’re talking about guns or in schools, the
Supreme Court has struck down Congressional legislation in that area, because
of Congressional overreaching. And so we
would be very concerned about getting a victory in Congress on universal
coverage of Section V, for example, and the next day metaphorically it being
struck down by the Supreme Court as an unauthorized extension of Congressional
power.
MS. FENG: One of the things that—I know we’re not in the
process of making law, because this is just a discussion, but I think one of
the things that people have certainly talked about in terms of a potential
expansion is looking at the recent record of court cases and also settlements
and memorandums of agreements with counties where there has been a finding that
some practice has had a discriminatory impact and where the county entered into
an agreement to make changes, that those may be counties that we want to keep a
watchful eye on to make sure that as we progress for the next 25 years or 50 years or however long the
Voting Rights Act provisions are extended for, that those counties, as they
endeavor to meet the changes that are required by courts or by the agreements,
by consent decree, are meeting those obligations. So that may be, there are some natural ways
to think about how to extend it where there is a record that exists, and where
we would not necessarily be advocating for a universal coverage, but a sensible
coverage.
Senator
Dunn, you’d also asked about questions or poison pills that may exist. The other area is around Section 203, the
Bilingual Voting Rights Assistance provisions and there are several colleagues
who are here who are also experts, so I’ll leave some of the details to them,
but the threshold for Section 203 coverage is if there is within a county a
community that either is 10,000 persons of five percent who do not speak
English very well. And so for instance,
in
So
there’s all sorts of questions about whether some of those numbers should be
adjusted up or down. One of the things
that I think my colleague from the Asian Pacific American Legal Center will
testify to is we’ve done some numbers, run some numbers and adjusting the
percentages up or down from five percent to four percent or three percent
doesn’t necessarily bring in any new groups.
Adjusting the number threshold of 10,000 to 9,000 or 8,000 will bring in
new groups. So one example might be for
instance in
SENATOR BOWEN: Actually, when it comes to the initiative, I
think, initiatives, we more commonly get complaints that someone with a fifth
grade literacy rate in English—
MS. FENG: Yeah (LAUGHTER)
SENATOR BOWEN: --is ill prepared.
MS. FENG: Absolutely.
And there was a recent case that came down talking about as people are
gathering signatures for petitions, that they need to now gather them not only
in English, but in the different languages that are required by Section 203,
largely because we want to make sure that as people are signing petitions, just
as we want to make sure as people are casting a ballot, that they’re voting or
signing the way that they had intended to.
And
then the last piece is just what language groups should be covered under
Section 203. And currently it is
Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans.
And this is another one of those areas that could be a potential poison
pill. Folks are saying, well, in
SENATOR DUNN: (INAUDIBLE) Let’s take
MS. FENG: In the 2000—so following the 2001 elections,
Now,
that is not a, it doesn’t impact on sort of your bottom line of how much you
spend. You’re just making sure that the
people in the polls reflect the people who are coming to vote. But, they do provide those extra
languages. In the 1990s it was all those
languages minus Korean.
SENATOR DUNN: Let me stop you for a second, I just want to
make sure I understand. When you say
provide those other languages other than the mandated one, you don’t mean
materials are provided, it’s just you got, you might have a volunteer at your
polling place.
MS. FENG: It varies.
It varies. So to give the example
in the 1990s, it was five languages. So
it was all the, the six languages that I mentioned minus the, minus Korean
coverage. And the City of
SENATOR DUNN: This was before it was mandated.
MS. FENG: This was before it was mandated. So they actually allocated funding to
translate materials, to have simple ballots available, to do outreach in the
Korean-American community, and to hire bilingual poll workers. In the 2000 decade, what we see is for some
communities, they are very eager to have bilingual assistance, so they will
work with the county to get materials translated and some of those materials
appear on, for instance,
SENATOR DUNN: But not at county expense.
MS. FENG: Not at county expense.
SENATOR DUNN: So it would be, say, a particular community is
looking for, in a cooperative relationship, translated materials. The cost of is probably borne by the
communities seeking the translated materials.
MS. FENG: That’s right.
On the other hand, the county or city can choose to add as many
languages as they want. We see that
happening across the
So
states around the country have done similar types of extension of voluntary,
bilingual assistance.
MR. RUBIN: And other counties, too, in
SENATOR DUNN: Okay, now
MR. RUBIN: Correct.
SENATOR DUNN: We’ve got the chart here, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese.
MR. RUBIN: Right.
SENATOR DUNN: Are there additional languages that
MR. RUBIN: I believe they are covering Spanish.
SENATOR DUNN: Well, no, these are in addition. I think all counties have to do that in
Spanish. That’s already there.
MR. RUBIN: Okay, I’m sorry. You mentioned the three.
SENATOR DUNN: These are the additional languages over and
above Spanish which is true, Spanish is true for every county as I understand
our materials in
MR. RUBIN: You know, it’s just coming up and reminding me
of this, and this took place probably in the early ’90s. I know Zoe Lofgren was still on the Board of
Supervisors at the time, so whenever that was.
I honestly don’t remember what the language was, but I know that it was
beyond the requisite languages under the statute.
SENATOR DUNN: And it may have been. And what I’m really driving at right now, and
I’ll finally let this go, Madam Chair, is today in California how many counties
at county expense provide translated materials over and above those languages
that are mandated?
MS. FENG:
SENATOR DUNN: Okay, what does San Diego provide on a voluntary basis at
their expense over and above what’s mandated on, at the list that we’ve got
here is simply Filipino, in addition to Spanish.
MS. FENG: Right.
So
SENATOR DUNN: Okay, I’m going to say a consent decree isn’t
quite voluntary. (LAUGHTER)
MS. FENG: Okay, but not technically required by Section
203, yes. So I just put that out as an
example, but you’re right. It’s not
voluntary.
SENATOR BOWEN: ____ category of voluntary consent decrees.
SENATOR DUNN: Exactly.
And the reason I keep driving at this is because we talk about the
abilities of a county to step further forward than mandated, but the real
question is in reality, it doesn’t sound like other than some early ‘90s examples
which subsequently became mandated, I don’t see a rush by counties to provide
at their cost to their voters translated materials in other than mandated
languages.
MS. FENG: I think that that’s correct.
MR. RUBIN: Of course, should the Legislature decide to
appropriate funds ____, I’m sure they would rush to the fore. Yeah and admittedly,
SENATOR DUNN: I understand.
____ gives them the money, they’ll be happy to do it.
MR. RUBIN: Right.
Well,
SENATOR DUNN: I didn’t want to go into that, but my guess is
for those that have done it on a voluntary basis historically I’m going to
guess it was done at flush budget time.
SENATOR BOWEN: You know, we’ll just ask Google to do the
translations and we can solve the problem.
SENATOR DUNN: Very true.
MR. RUBIN: But, that may be something that the
Legislature is, you know, should consider.
SENATOR BOWEN: I think that’s part of the reason we’re asking
these questions, is to look at what happens, what the state’s options are. That will be part of the conversation, as
well.
MR. RUBIN: Like you did with the California Voting Rights
Act by extending beyond the protections of the federal Voting Rights Act
Section II, you could do something similar here in Section 203.
SENATOR BOWEN: Sure.
Senator Dunn has one more question then we’re at
SENATOR DUNN: Madam Chair, I knew there was going to be a
problem when I showed up.
SENATOR BOWEN: Oh, your kinds of problems I’ll take in a
hearing, thank you.
SENATOR DUNN: Here’s my other question that I know it’s an
area that the three of you, and I welcome our additional panel members if they
so choose to offer their comments, as well, on an issue that I think you’re
intimately aware of. And I want to raise
it and just get your input, quick response to it, because it’s a little bit off
the beaten path for today. And that is,
as we look, as we watch the folks a the federal level look at the Voting Rights
Act, the question is as we’re probably in this room all aware, and to put it in
lay terms, you have a constitutional right to vote, but do you have a
constitutional right to have that vote counted?
The gap that exists that we saw come up in neon lights in the election
of 2000. Some argue that had we had the
constitutional right to have a vote counted, the outcome of the presidential
election, 2000, would have been different.
I’m
not here to debate that. My question is,
if we look at tinkering with the Voting Rights Act, your thoughts on adding a
provision that in addition to the right to vote, the right to have that vote
counted.
MR. RUBIN: Embodied in statute?
SENATOR DUNN: If we could do it constitutionally, great. But, since that’s a more difficult process,
putting it in the Voting Rights Act itself.
MR. RUBIN: That’s, well the constitutional convention
always makes me nervous.
SENATOR DUNN: Right, that’s why, okay, let’s do it
statutorily.
MR. RUBIN: I mean, I think it’s an interesting notion,
although the Supreme Court said that it would not apply to any other instance,
that is pretty much what they said in Bush v. Gore. That the fact that you voted in one county
and I voted in a different county and they’re going to be counted, those votes
were going to be counted differently would be a violation of equal protection
is, of course, the basis for them stopping the vote. So, certainly as a principle, I think it’s
very important and it certainly as we see, I think you might have missed the
earlier comments. We did reference the
SENATOR DUNN: I’m going to distinguish that one, Mr. Rubin,
because I think that’s more the issue of act of voting and the barriers that
may exist for that which has been our historical fight, versus the okay, I’ve
given you the full right to have access to that, to the ability to cast your
ballot.
MR. RUBIN: Right.
SENATOR DUNN: Now the question is, what happens after you’ve
cast it?
SENATOR BOWEN: Now the issue is that we have that provision
in law in
MR. RUBIN: Right.
SENATOR BOWEN: Right.
Even though it’s clear that had the write in vote been counted, that
would have happened.
MR. RUBIN: Sure.
SENATOR BOWEN: So, I mean, I think that’s the question we
face.
MR. RUBIN: Well, it would certainly, I mean, I guess the
bottom line and I don’t know whether you’re getting at the issue of machines or
not--
SENATOR DUNN: No, I’m not, Mr. Rubin. Let me explain and I promise, Madam Chair,
I’ll try to make this short. Is, as I
understand the debate over this issue, it’s really one, if you ignore sort of
power politics that get involved with counting ballots, but to the practical
side of it that there are many jurisdictions where the outcome is so certain
that we just stop counting, because it’s not worth the expenditure anymore,
because it’s not going to change the outcome of where this state goes on the
presidential race. So why expend tax
dollars continuing to count an outcome that is clear?
Okay,
that’s the practical reality or downside, so to speak. If we have a—I’ll use the word
constitutional, but the constitutional right to have my vote counted--
MR. RUBIN: Right
SENATOR DUNN: --versus the situation where now you have a
close election and if in fact we have a constitutional right to have our vote
counted after cast, that the United States Supreme Court could not have
terminated the counting in
MR. RUBIN: Right.
SENATOR DUNN: So, the question is do we as policy makers
from your perspective, do you recommend that we start further exploration of
this issue to perhaps institute a statutory right to have your vote counted
under certain circumstances such as closeness of the election, _____.
MS. FENG: I think that in principle we would absolutely
support the notion of having every vote counted. I think the challenge is logistically how do
you make that happen. And you brought up
a good example. Let me bring up another
example that I think
Right
now
SENATOR DUNN: Let me stop you. For my own understanding, I want to stop you
right there. ____ because you’ve got far
more knowledge of this than I which was greatly appreciated, was why you’re
here today. In an audit context, what
you’re referring to is not a post election audit, but in fact an audit that is
done during the counting process, is that correct?
MS. FENG: Yes. In
order to ensure that—
SENATOR DUNN: I just wanted to clarify.
MS. FENG: --you got it right and you didn’t, right, you,
something’s not going funky with the tabulation machines or something’s not
going wrong with the way that you write.
And so what I would just say is that there are some fairly serious,
logistical challenges that one would have to make sure that you’ve figured out
when you say that every vote should be counted.
And again, I say that in principle, we absolutely would support it, and
we absolutely think that where, for instance, close races, write-in candidates,
situations where there’s a count that’s in question, you certainly should be
recounting everything. But, again, you
know, how do you do that and how do you make sure that you’re, how do you draw
the line in an accurate way that does not create an undue burden on the
counties. And then also, how do you
ensure that even for things that happen on a typical basis, like audits, that
you’re creating a workable solution that a county can actually implement. I think Connie McCormick will be speaking
later, so I’ll let her speak to the challenges of doing that. But, I think that there are some serious
challenges to figuring out how you could apply that, that principle, in the
law.
SENATOR DUNN: And I agree with that, which is why I asked
for some brief input. Although, the only
cautionary comment I would share for all of us is as you, each of the three of
you probably are well aware, when you tell the average voter they have the
right to vote, but not the right to have that vote counted, it is a shocking
revelation to the average voter.
MR. RUBIN: So you’re also concerned about landslide votes
where at some point their vote doesn’t count.
You’re concerned about the chilling that—
SENATOR DUNN: I simply raise the issue, because the Bush vs.
Gore decision brought to the forefront this gap in the voting process, if I
may. And the question for us on a public
policy side is it a gap that we close under all or some circumstances so that
the right to vote actually has complete meaning to it by adding the right to
have that vote count?
MR. RUBIN: Right, right.
The only other thing I would—
SENATOR BOWEN: I add to that to have it count it as it was
cast.
SENATOR DUNN: Yeah, as it was cast. Good point.
SENATOR BOWEN: That’s another issue.
MR. RUBIN: You know, there are alternatives. This doesn’t work in a presidential election,
but in multi-member elections and that’s another sort of take on having the
vote count. It is, that instead of
wasting a vote because you’re voting for a candidate that has the requisite
number of votes, in what’s call a single transferable vote system that San
Francisco recently adopted for its Board of Supervisors, that vote isn’t
wasted. It is not counted, but it goes
to your second choice.
SENATOR DUNN: And I’m familiar with that. I’m not commenting on that issue at all,
because I think you’re average voter even if they’re casting a vote for someone
they know has lost and lost big, it’s something important to them. So I’m still have a kind of not quite there
yet on the example you’re referring to, but I understand the argument
associated with it.
MR. RUBIN: Sure, and I appreciate the—
SENATOR BOWEN: Let me move us to the next panel before we
disenfranchise our speakers.
MR. RUBIN: Thank you very much.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
MS. FENG: Thank you very much.
SENATOR BOWEN: Let me ask Erica Teasley Linnick, John Trasviña,
Karin Wang, Juana Majel-Dixon. Did I get
the whole first panel ____? Let’s start
with John, given the recent victory on the recall petition issue, and ask you
to talk a little bit about the Voting Rights Act and your work in on these
issues.
MR. JOHN TRASVIÑA: Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m John Trasviña, senior vice president for
law and policy at MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund. First I want to thank your
leadership on various issues, including election administration and reducing
information as a gap between citizens and the government. And the Voting Rights Act really enshrines
those two principles of good government.
I’ve been involved with the Voting Rights Act since 1978 when I worked
for Mayor George Moscone of
And
it is interesting that the Voting Rights Act has, while it has a tremendous
record of achievement in terms of empowering citizens and reducing barriers
between government and citizens at election time, it also has a long history of
poor implementation and a lot of confusion as to what it does and really brings
up a lot of symbolic opposition. But,
over the years, I think the trend has been that it has greatly improved in its
administration.
At
the beginning, there was poor implementation particularly in
In
In
Madam
Chair, you mentioned the recent case in
It is
a very public process. It is very
essential to the electoral process. It
is for that reason and because the State Elections Code requires so, the
petitions to have certain text, to have a response from the target of the
recall, to have the petitions in a particular size font and type, that for
those reasons it is such a central part of the process that the Section 203
applies. It’s not a private
process. It is something that all voters
are entitled to know so that voters are not confused into signing a petition
that they do not otherwise want to sign.
Beyond
that, I just want to mention a couple of points, and some of the, that I
alluded to earlier the concerns over the years about the bilingual provisions
of the Act. There’s still a tremendous
amount of confusion as to how we can have
Second
is that the materials can be carefully, carefully targeted so that not
everybody—bilingual ballots are not forced upon any individual. In fact, these days, the way the ballots are
used is you really can’t tell who’s using the Spanish language ballot or the English
language ballot or any other language ballot.
It’s all in the voters handbook.
You look to one side of the page for one language, the other side of the
page for another. So there’s still some
very high cost assumptions about ballots cost an extraordinary amount per
ballot request. Well, it’s really the
wrong way of looking at it and the Federal Elections Commission has said that
since 1979.
Third
is that some arguing that having bilingual ballots is a discouragement. It takes away an incentive to learn
English. And that’s clearly not the
case. We have tremendously long waiting
lists for adult English classes in every county in this state. And getting a ballot on election day, whether
it’s twice or three times a year in
Finally,
this is not something that ought to be privatized. We don’t want to be in a system where we
would say well, let’s just let volunteers come in and explain the ballot. You don’t want a union steward to be
explaining the ballot to his union member.
You don’t want an employer to be explaining it to an employee. You don’t even want a spouse explaining it to
his spouse. The voter is entitled to
getting the same information that the English language voter gets straight from
the registrar voters and the voters handbook.
And the voters handbook provides information on both sides of a
proposition and is consistent and reliable information and that’s where the
information ought to come from.
Beyond
that we have very successful voter registrars who are able to recruit language
minority polling officials so that they rarely cost more money. Whether you have a—you can have a polling
official who’s English only or bilingual in a polling place is that it doesn’t
really cost any more to have a bilingual person.
Finally,
I just want to say that the Voting Rights Act really fulfills the promise and
commitment of democracy and we were right as a country every time we have had
the issue before us to expand voting--taking away the property requirements,
taking away the gender requirements, taking away the racial requirements. And now as of 1975 taking away the—well ’65
with the literacy test banning, and then ’75 with the extension of the
Act. There are those who would want to
take this back to an earlier age, age for example such as in
And
perhaps it would be great if everybody spoke the common language, but we don’t
get to that by limiting peoples’ constitutional rights. The Voting Rights Act by contrast opens up
the process and makes sure that citizens, while they are learning English, are
able to vote and cast effective votes, knowledgeable votes reducing the
barriers between citizens and the government.
And for those reasons, we appreciate your holding this hearing today,
and we encourage your support for extension of the Voting Rights Act in
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
SENATOR DUNN: Thank you Madam Chair. Very quickly—
SENATOR BOWEN: I am going to impose a quota system on your
questions, though, Joe.
SENATOR DUNN: As you should.
The ____ case obviously came out of my district. I didn’t track it closely. The courts ____ I’m aware of the recent
decision, of course. I’m just
curious. In a very Readers Digest
version, what is, what was the legal basis of the opposition to providing those
petitions in a language other than English?
And second question, what was the ruling at the trial court level?
MR. TRASVIÑA: The trial, the Ninth Circuit reversed the
trial. The trial court had ruled that
Section 203 did not apply to the recall petitioning. And that was the position that the
jurisdiction took. The rationale is that
a recall provisions are not part of the electoral process, even though it is,
it totally it would take away the previous vote of all of the voters of the
county. This was the
SENATOR DUNN: And did at the Ninth Circuit level, were there
amicus filed on behalf of the jurisdiction?
Were there folks supporting the argument with amicus briefs that in fact
it was not part of the electoral process?
MR. TRASVIÑA: I believe the only briefs that were, only
appearances were by the school district and the county and MALDEF.
SENATOR BOWEN: Alright.
Let’s go on. Ms. Juana Dixon, why
don’t you—sorry, Juana Majel-Dixon.
We’ll have you next. Thank you
for joining us.
MS. JUANA MAJEL-DIXON:
I’m very humbled by the fact that you can say
my name correctly. It is a native name that
means dove in my clan. ____. In my language I ask to speak with a clean
heart and a clear mind. Thank you. It is an honor to testify on this important
topic. I want to thank the members of
the committee and I have been aware of your work. You’re tirelessly working on this and I’m
very, very honored to be before you.
I’m
interested in what it is that you do. I
wanted you to know a little bit about who we are so that I can tell you the
message of our people. Since 1944, the
National Congress of American Indians has worked to strengthen, protect, and
inform the public and congress on the governmental rights of American Indians
and Alaskan natives. NCI is the oldest
and largest organization addressing American Indian interests, represents more
than 250 American Indian sovereign tribes, as well as Alaskan native
villages. The NCI leadership recognizes
the importance of Native American political participation at state and federal
levels. It plays an important role in
protecting our rights, communities, and cultures along with the
responsibilities that you carry.
Through
our native vote project, we were committed to maximizing the power native votes
at the polls. A critical component of
the native vote project is ensuring that every Indian person who wants to
participate is able to cast his or her ballot free from harassment or
intimidation and know that it will be counted.
This depends on the reauthorization, the rigorous enforcement of
provisions of the Voting Rights last month, voting right act. Just this past month in
Native
Americans have experienced a long history of disenfranchisement although Indians
were given full citizenship rights in 1924, it took nearly 40 years for all 50
states to give the Native Americans the right to vote. Many states included the State of
In
the 2004 election, native people across the country experienced a number of
problems at the polls. They were
following their cars of Indian voters and writing down their license
plates. On one reservation in
With
the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, congress took the first necessary
steps to start the process of remedying the history of discrimination and
disenfranchisement. The Voting Rights is
widely viewed as the nation’s most effective civil rights law. It is one that you and I as citizens and
sovereigns of this nation experience equally.
As
you know, several key provisions of the Voting Rights Act will expire in 2007
without the reauthorization. These
expiring provisions have been important tools for increase in Native American
political participation. Several jurisdictions
with large native populations including
Now while
we have made tremendous progress in the last 40 years, we obviously have a long
way to go. While no one knows exactly
how many Native American language speakers live in the
Furthermore,
it’s the policy of the federal government as expressed in the Native Language
Act of 1990 to preserve, protect, promote the rights and freedom of Native
Americans to use, practice, develop Native American languages. Section 203 ensures all native people,
particularly our elders, have access to the ballot box. At the same time, it recognizes the
importance of preserving and honoring indigenous languages and cultures.
Traditionally
voter participation rates by American Indians and Alaskan natives have been
among the lowest of communities within the
I was
asked to present this to you and speaking in a traditional manner to my people,
we had a tribal meeting. We meet only
four times a year, which is probably very conservative compared to most
people. But, it’s done half in our
language during that time and half not.
And in that time they said that when we give breath to the words, they
no longer belong to you, they belong to the people. And in our language we have no word such as
love or hate, so when we speak about the concepts of voting, our people
understand that it is giving breath to the words or someone. And it means in that manner that I listen to
you and I ____. And it’s when you think
in those traditional concepts it’s a very powerful thing in terms of
understanding the inclusivity of all of you as my relatives. And amongst our nations in Indian country, we
acknowledge that all of you from wherever you come, the fact that you’re on
this
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
I just have a question about how the determination is made in
Imperial/Riverside, which languages to use?
MS. DIXON: It’s fascinating, because of the
missionization period, you have your Capistrano which was your ____. And you had then going to the Gabriano and
Serreno. And what you end up having then
is they are the ____ people and that’s their language. And as you go further, as you know with the
treaty rights of
SENATOR BOWEN: So do you get all three languages? Ballot materials in all three languages?
MS. DIXON: Well, what we do, because Kaweya and Lucena,
you know how you have English and in the South they say, talk very slow? But, it’s English? It’s like that with Kaweya and Luceno. One’s a longer version of the other. And Kumyi is the desert languages so they
compliment one another very well. So as
a result, you end up using two and often the Kaweyas would prefer to go to the
ballots with a slower, I mean a quick version of the language. I mean, we are even modifying our language to
make it smaller.
SENATOR BOWEN: And how are voters given the choice?
MS. DIXON: Well, some of the tribes and because we live
in such strong tribal communities, we do exclusively in some communities
absentee ballots, where the county and/or the stations haven’t really, because
we’ve had this problem being too far away and getting to vote, for example,
Cabazon. Their entire community voted
absentee. And so they have the
discussions both in English and Indian, but that’s the, I think also a very
unique aspect of living in a tribal community.
I’m sure just as you have the housing authority, things housing
communities outside of Indian country and the different districts that people
live in, they may have concentrated areas, but I don’t think it’s enough. From what I’m listening to it’s not.
SENATOR BOWEN: Alright.
Thank you.
MS. DIXON: I do have an answer to your counting thing.
SENATOR BOWEN: Yes.
MS. DIXON: One of the most—there’s no question in my mind
that constitutionally when I understand the right to vote and the right to be
counted, it just seems unquestionable that it’s an absolute thing to be done whether
your ahead or in a dead end race, and it shocks me to know that we might come
up with gradations of that and variations of that and that we would even put
our Supreme Court and pin them in a corner to have to rule on something like
that when it is, I think, probably one of the greatest freedoms we have as a
country.
SENATOR DUNN: I actually agree with you. Our problem right now is there is no right to
have your vote counted. None. And so the question is do we start to go into
that territory and if so, how far? To
the absolute? Or to some kind of
balancing practicalities with the right?
MS. DIXON: Well, I think because we as a people have
gotten it complicated, we’re going to have to uncomplicate ourselves to get
there.
SENATOR DUNN: I agree.
MS. DIXON: Would you—please forgive me. I’d like to give you my testimony, but I do
have to fly to D.C., so—
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you, very much.
MS. DIXON: Thank you for the time.
SENATOR BOWEN: Okay, let me turn to Karen Wong and then we’ll
ask Erica Teasley Linnick to bring up the—what is it? Bat clean up is the baseball term. Wrong season, but. . .
MS. KAREN WONG: Good morning.
Hopefully I can work this microphone.
My name is Karen Wong. I am the
vice president of programs at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of
Southern California based here in
Our
organization was founded in 1983. We are
a non-profit group, legal group, dedicated to advocating for civil rights and
also engaging in legal services and education and policy work. For over two decades, our organization has
defended the rights, the voting rights of Asian American voters in
In
addition to the policy work that we have been doing, we have also engaged in
some other relevant activities I’m going to talk about a little bit. We have done election day monitoring of hundreds
of poll sites in areas with large Asian American and other populations in
And
then we engage in a lot of demographic research. By that I mean taking data from voting, also
from the census, and really looking at it carefully in terms of how the
Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities are represented. A lot of our work is looking at just
aggregating data that we can talk about the ethnic communities, both together,
but also separately because the communities are very different.
Through
these activities, the
So,
of course, we are here to support the Congressional renewal of all of the
provisions of the Voting Rights Act that are scheduled to expire in 2007. Because of limited time, of course, I’m just
going to focus on Section 203. First
around the increase in compliance with the Act and the positive impact it’s had
on the Asian-American immigrant communities, as you’ve already heard a little
bit, during most of the 1990s, L.A. County was not in full compliance with
Section 203. Instances of what
noncompliance meant were things like not having enough bilingual poll workers
or not having enough translated materials available. As groups like the Legal Center and other
groups including many of our colleagues here at the hearing today, as we’ve all
worked together with the L.A. County Registrar of Voter who’s also here today,
the county has brought itself into compliance with Section 203 and is now
really considered a model for the rest of the nation, not just for
California. And I think that is to be
commended.
One
example of how the county’s compliance has increased over time in its impact on
the community is looking at the number of voters who request language
assistance. According to data gathered
by the county itself, the total number of voters in
This
increase reflects not just the increased and improved ____ at the county
itself, but also obviously the need that language minority voters have for
language assistance. Other jurisdictions
in
According
to the Justice Department, the levels of voter registration in
Let’s
look a little bit at the continuing need for language assistance under Section
203. So despite these gains and these
improvements, many Asian-American voters continue to need the protections of
Section 203. Many Asian-American voters
have high rates of what we call limited English proficiency. Voters who are limited English proficient are
unable to speak or understand English at a level high enough to participate in
the electoral process. So this is not
about people who don’t speak English at all.
Many limited English proficient voters speak some level of English. The issue is whether they speak it well
enough to engage in our process of democracy.
And as you know, and you’ve already heard this mentioned by other
speakers, election materials in
Just
this past November in 2005, the special election ballot had only eight ballot
initiatives, which I guess is an improvement over 16, but it addressed
extremely complicated and some say arcane topics such as prescription drug
discounts, redistricting, electricity regulation. Voter guides are also something that are
extremely difficult to read. The
November, 2005, special election guide was Prop. 77 pages long. Many of us don’t even read books that long. I mean, that’s a lot of material. And the description of things like
Proposition 80 included phrases such as renewables portfolio standard and time
differentiated electricity rates. And I
challenge anyone in this room to explain what those mean even in English.
So
because obviously of limited English proficiency and the complexity of our
election, language is a very important barrier and it is a possibly
insurmountable barrier for those seeking to engage in our process of democracy. Fortunately Section 203 does lower that
hurdle, and that’s why it’s important to continue, to renew it.
Just
a little bit of data from our own exit polling.
We’ve done this for many years and our own exit poll data shows that
Asian-American and Latino voters need and use Section 203’s required language
assistance. For example, in November,
2000, 54 percent of Asian-American voters and 46 percent of Latino voters in
Southern California actually, that would be L.A. and Orange Counties where we
have done polling, indicated that they were more likely to vote if they
received language assistance. And in
November, 2004, more than a third of Asian-American voters used language
assistance to vote. And in some
communities, again, that number is much higher.
In Korean community, for example, 48 percent--Chinese community, 37
percent.
A
couple comments on the continuing discrimination against voters—I think you
actually heard a very compelling example from Kathay Feng at Common Cause this
morning, so I’m not going go into detail on this. I just want to reiterate that our poll
monitors over the years have seen continuing discrimination against
Asian-American voters. It has been as
recent as the most recent election. But
we’ve seen things like in March, 2000, in Santa Ana, a poll inspector
inappropriately asking young Asian-American voters for I.D. and then saying, “Everybody
wants to come to America and take what is ours, our land,” to these
Asian-American voters.
In a
November general election, in 2000 general election, San Francisco county a
poll monitor saw a poll worker yell at a Chinese-American voter, very similar
to the story you heard earlier, and took the voter’s ballot away. The poll worker was frustrated that the
voter, who did not speak English fluently, was not following his instructions
and the voter left without casting their ballot.
One
final comment I’d like to make since you are—I’m looking at the issue of the
Voting Rights Act and again Kathay and others alluded to this earlier, in
renewing, in addition to renewing Section 203, the Legal Center believes that
Congress should also take steps to strengthen Section 203. One way to do this is by lowering the numeric
threshold for coverage. A number of
Asian-American populations that desperately need the protections of Section 203
are not currently covered by Section 203, and may not be covered under the next
coverage determination made in about five years, unless Section 203’s numeric
threshold is adjusted from 10,000 to actually were asking for 7,500.
In
California a lower numeric threshold of 7,500 would likely trigger Section 203
coverage for a very large Asian population present here in L.A. County—the
Cambodian community, a predominantly refugee community from Southeast Asia
concentrated in Long Beach. This community
clearly falls within the group of citizens that congress has intended to
protect and empower under Section 203.
Fifty-seven percent, that’s almost 60 percent of Cambodian-Americans in
Not
surprisingly, Cambodian-American voters have low turnout rates during
elections. In November, 2004, for
example, only about 50 percent of Cambodian American registered voters in
So in
closing, I wanted to thank you again for inviting the
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
And last but not least.
MS. ERICA TEASLEY LINNICK: I think it’s still morning. Oh, no.
It’s not, so good afternoon. It’s
good to be here. My name is Erica Teasly
Linnick and I’m Western Regional Counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and
Education Fund here in the
SENATOR BOWEN: It’s nice to be working on something that
matters, like renewable portfolio standards and time of use metering and—
MS. LINNICK: Who knows what all that means. So it’s good to be here to talk to you about
the Voting Rights Act and to talk to you in particular as to what the Legal
Defense Fund is doing nationally and here in
Since
the founding of LDF in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall, as the national organization
committed to the equal justice for all Americans, we’ve been a leader in the
efforts on the voting rights front to secure and protect minority voting rights
in the
Renewal
and enforcement of the voter registration act has been and continues to be of
critical importance to the Legal Defense Fund as part of our efforts to
vindicate the voting rights of African-Americans and other racial and language
minorities. As we move towards renewal
prior to 2007, the 2007 expiration of certain critical enforcement provisions,
we’ve been working with local cooperating attorneys in different states and
with other civil rights organizations to gather evidence regarding the value of
the Voting Rights Act and the necessity for its renewal.
We’re
also educating members of the public and elected officials about the
effectiveness of the Act and how it actually works to promote inclusion of all
eligible voters in the political process through Section 5, through the
language assistance provisions, through the federal observer provisions which
have been key, which serve as important checks on both familiar and new methods
of disenfranchisement that we’ve seen and also vote dilution, as well.
The
Voting Rights Act is widely regarded as one of the most critical achievements
of the civil rights movement. You know,
it embodies sort of the promise of equal political opportunity and political
inclusion. And as I mentioned before as
we were, you know, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Voting
Rights Act, we find though, that we’re still struggling to keep the doors of
political access open to all voters.
Reviewing
the history of the Voting Rights Act, we can see that it has served to protect
and help African-American voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters and
Native American voters gain political access and political empowerment. But, while such an examination of the history
shows the effectiveness of the act, it also demonstrates an ongoing need for
its protections. You’ve heard earlier
today about what’s happening in the State of
Our
state of
As
coordinators of Los Angeles County’s 2004 election protection program, we
witnessed first hand that voters continued to experience a myriad of problems
with voter registration and also the problems as they go to access the
polls. And the fact that minorities, voters
in a state like
We’ve
joined coalition partners, MALDEF, in litigation back in the 1990 case here in
L.A. County, Garza v. L.A. County where we represented interveners in that case
which challenged the redistricting plans of the county and we saw a change
after that case in the, in what, you know, how the body was representative of
the population here.
SENATOR BOWEN: ____ my first foray into redistricting was in
the 1990 lines with a group of community groups from around the
MS. LINNICK: It still is.
(LAUGHTER) It still is.
And so we were involved in that case, in the county redistricting case
where the courts found that minority voting rights were in fact impacted and
that the Latino community was being fragmented.
Robert Rubin from the lawyers committee mentioned earlier cases in
Hansford, DOJ objections there, and the Lopez case. The Voting Rights Act has also served to
deter possible discriminatory actions as in the case of
So as
you can see, the Voting Rights Act has been used in
And
nationally LDF will continue to push for full inclusion of African-American
voters and other voters of color in the political process and for
reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
The expiring enforcement provisions must be renewed and the vitality of
Section 5 restored in light of recent Supreme Court cases that have undermined
its effectiveness.
So we
want to thank you for this opportunity to talk about the Voting Rights Act and
to talk to you a little bit about what LDF is doing nationally.
SENATOR BOWEN: We look forward seeing the results of the
conference and it’s nice to be starting early enough on some thing to be able
to have some time to plan and work through the issues.
Panel,
thank you. Let me ask Mr. Norby to come
up at this point. He has to leave at
Welcome,
Mr. Norby.
MR. CHRIS NORBY: Thank you, Senator Bowen, Senator Dunn. Good to see both of you again. I’m proud to be the one person testimony who
actually has run in an election and luckily won several elections. So with that, the three of us have something
in common.
My
name is Chris Norby. I represent the
fourth supervisorial district of Orange County which includes the cities the
LaHabra, Placencia,
Many
people ask me, many of my constituents, especially now that we have this new
East Lake system in Orange County where you go into the ____, the first thing
you see is a choice of what language you want to vote in, a lot about these
requirements. Why are multi-lingual
ballots required? In which languages are
they needed? Do they really help
immigrants or just perpetuate negative stereotypes? The U.S. Justice Department, as you know,
enforces and interprets election rules according to the Voting Rights Act. These vary widely among
In
And
of course if you’ve read, the typical ballot arguments, or if you’ve read a lot
of literature that you get in the mail around election time, you realize that
understanding that isn’t all that difficult.
Usually, it’s more in graphic pictures and just a few words. That’s why the vast majority of immigrants do
vote in English. Of the 1.5 million
I
would submit to you that multilingualism perpetuates the false stereotypes that
immigrants are not learning English, either by the lack of desire or the lack
of ability. Both stereotypes are
wrong. Today’s naturalized immigrants
have a far higher education and income levels than they did in past
generations. Their exposure to English
also in their native countries also is much higher. Two-thirds of all Orange Counties immigrants
have been in this country for over 10 years.
Explaining complicated ballot propositions in English is difficult
enough. There have been many legal
challenges over the wording of ballot arguments, some over a single word. Accurately translating all this material in
five other languages is highly problematic.
Chinese, for example, uses over 20,000 different characters with two
different writing systems. There’s a
mainland system which is simplified.
There’s the traditional system which is used in
Now,
for whatever reason, in
So
when we’re talking about Chinese, we’re not even talking about one
language. We’re talking about many, many
different spoken languages in two totally distinct written systems. Are we going to use both? Which one are we going to use? Not surprisingly, the vast majority of
Chinese-American voters in
The
Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured African-Americans their right to vote which
had long been denied in a Jim Crow south.
It was long overdue legislation aimed at race-based political
disenfranchisement, but it had nothing to do with multi-lingual voting. It was only in subsequent renewals of the
Voting Rights Act that multilingual ballot requirements crept in. And these rules have become increasingly
expensive, increasingly aggressive, and increasingly confusing to
understand.
The
method of determining non-English speakers is also highly suspect. On census forms all of us, immigrant or
native born, are asked how well we speak English? This is on the long form. You get four possible answers: very well,
well, not well, or not at all. Now all
of who checked well are automatically labeled as limited English. Only a very well answer is considered
fluent. I don’t know what they do about
the native speakers that were born here that only speak well. Usually when you say you’re well, you speak
something well, it’s good enough.
Speaking English well should be good enough, as it was obviously good
enough to pass the citizenship test.
In
addition, all adults who have not finished the fifth grade, presumably like
Abraham Lincoln, are presumed to be illiterate.
And when more than 5,000 or 10,000, five percent or 10,000 of voting age
population accounting meet these criterion, the non-English ballot requirements
take effect. And you heard one of the
speakers saying this 10,000 threshold should be lowered to 7,500. Well, you’ve got counties like
Let
me give you some other examples of what the Department of Justice has asked our
registrar to do. Our registrar told me
in
So
the DOJ guys said, okay, as a compromise, you have to send out multilingual
questionnaires to 118,856 foreign born voters offering them non-English voting
materials. So we did that at a cost of
$14,262. These are some of the responses
that we got. I’d like to submit these to
you if I could approach. These are some
of the responses that we received among the hundreds of responses that we
received from outraged immigrant voters who felt they were being insulted and
patronized because of our assumption that they didn’t speak adequate English in
order to vote. And these are actual
copies of some of the, only a sampling of the responses that we got. And as you can see, the responses here, these
are people, these aren’t rednecks, these aren’t people who are part of the minutemen,
these aren’t people that listen to Ken and John every day. These are immigrant voters who said, look, I
came here. I know English. Don’t patronize me by offering this material
in non-English languages.
The
Justice Department officials may soon require the Orange Country Registrar of
Voters--this is being threatened as I speak--that all voter pamphlets contain all
five languages, even those sent to native English speakers, not just individual
voter pamphlets by language, but everything contain all of it. And they even said that each line has to be
simultaneously translated. Not a
different section for every language.
This would cost the county over $20 million per election and incite
anti-immigrant feelings and give the voter pamphlet the bulk of a
phonebook. Think of how many kids we
could immunize for $20 million or librarians we could hire. Think of how many English tutors we could
hire for $20 million per election cycle.
Tomorrow
at our Orange County Board of Supervisors board meeting, we’ll be considering
whether or not to challenge that decision of the Ninth District Court. I can’t speak for the Board, but if that
decision is allowed to stand, then all of the materials, all of the petitions
that we receive for statewide or countywide petitions, all of the voter
information, all of the ballot statements that candidates make will have to be
printed in these different languages if we don’t challenge this.
In
considering renewal of the Voting Rights Act, we must not perpetuate negative
stereotypes on immigrant voters, nor burden the county government with millions
of unfunded mandates. Keep the spirit of
the Voting Rights Act. Keep it available
to all. But, make it inclusive. And make it not something that continues to
perpetuate negative immigrants, negative stereotypes about immigrants and place
unfunded burdens on us, the counties, that have to figure out what these rules
even mean, let alone carry them out.
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
Question? Okay. Thank you, Senator Dunn, for joining us. Actually, I’m informed that Ms. Lupe Moreno
is here and so what I’d like to do since we’ve had a discussion about English
is call Ms. Moreno up to be part of—oh, she’s not here now. She will be back. Alright.
She’ll be back. Okay. That’s fine.
Let’s bring up . . . We’re ready for
him if you’re ready for us.
MS. LUPE MORENO: I’m sorry.
I thought was going to be the last speaker.
SENATOR BOWEN: We, since Mr. Norby needed to leave, we
thought we’d do a little panel juggling and you seemed to fit better with Mr.
Norby’s testimony than with remainder of what’s to come, so I thought we’d take
you at the—
Well,
thank you for that. Well, I’m here
representing Pro-English. And I’m
representing the executive director of Pro-English. And so here is some of his comments and then
I’ll have a few of my own, if you don’t mind.
SENATOR BOWEN: Certainly.
MS. MORENO: Chairman Bowman (sic) and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the
opportunity to present our views on renewing the bilingual ballot provisions of
the Voting Rights Act. Pro-English is a
national organization whose mission is to defend English as the common language
of our country and to make it the official language at all levels of
government, a position endorsed by 79 percent of the voters and 81 percent of
naturalized citizens according to the most recent poll.
Bilingual
ballots are costly, unfunded mandate that functions like a tax on the English-speaking
Americans. Two separate general counting
office reports to Congress found solid evidence that in most jurisdictions
covered by Section 203, bilingual ballots are hardly used. And when they are used, they are scarcely
justified the cost and effort needed to provide them. In Casey’s written testimony, he gives a
number of reasons why we think the bilingual ballot provisions of the Voting
Rights Act should be, should not be reauthorized. But, in the time I have I will focus on
four. First, the rationale for providing
bilingual ballots is no longer valid.
The reasons that persuaded Congress to add the bilingual ballot
provisions to the Voting Rights Act ten years after it was enacted had nothing
to do with voting rights discrimination.
Rather supporters told Congress that certain language minority groups
had not had access to equal educational opportunities in this country. Those were Alaskan natives, American Indians,
American citizens of Asian and Hispanic descent. Backers said this lack of opportunity had
caused these groups’ literacy rate to be below the national average and argued
that they needed help ____ educational system ___. This is why Congress intended bilingual
ballots to be a temporary remedial measure.
Thirty years later the driving force
behind the literacy rates of the two largest of these groups, Asians and
Hispanics, has little to do with the educational opportunities in this
country. I want to make a distinction
between these two groups and the American and Alaskan natives. In 1975, the vast majority of our Hispanics
and Asian citizens were natives. Today
the situation has changed. Immigrants
are now by far the biggest component in these groups, the dominating factor
affecting their English literacy rates.
Recent studies suggest the main reason for the elevated school drop out
rates among these groups is the lack of educational opportunities they
experienced in their native countries before migrating. It is wrong to impose extraordinary ballot
costs on American taxpayers, because the voluntary decision of millions of
people to move here. And we see no
justification for continuing a remedy whose reason for being is completely out
of date.
Second,
bilingual ballots should not be necessary for almost 100 years immigrants have
been required to know English in order to neutralize. This isn’t appropriate for a county whose
constitution and founding documents were written in English, whose three
branches of government operate almost completely in English, and whose
political life is conducted almost entirely in the English language. So why are we forcing states and counties to
provide bilingual ballots for neutralized citizens who should be able to read
and understand English? If people are
superventing the law and neutralizing without learning English, then it is
their responsibility to deal with these consequences, not the responsibility of
the American people.
Bilingual
ballots are also an affront to millions of neutralized American citizens who
migrated to this country, played by the rules, and made great sacrifices to
learn English. Third, the bilingual
ballots and poll workers also increase the risk of election fraud. There is no doubt that language is an
effective way to conceal illegal activity, for the Departments of Motor
Vehicles in various states to the U.S. Prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
interpreters have been caught using language as a cover to break the law. Even commit espionage.
And
here is where I want to add a few of my words.
I do live in
So, I
know the area well, and yes, we have a lot of problems there because we have
people registering that are not citizens and some of the that are registered
that don’t even know they’re registered.
So there is a very big problem with these citizens not knowing the
language. When our law states that for
them to be even become citizens, they have to have a good understanding of
English.
Bilingual
voter outreach materials, voter registration forms, absentee ballots, and the
like all increase the risk of non-citizens will register and vote, either
accidentally or deliberately violation of the law. In recent years there have been a growing
number of cases in which non-citizens have been caught illegally registering
and voting. Bilingual ballots also
undermine our national unity. We are in
the midst of the largest and most diverse flow of immigration in our nation’s history
as the distinguished chair of the U.S. Commission Reform, Congresswoman Barbara
Jordan said in testifying to Congress, “Culture and religious diversity does
not pose a threat to the national interest, as long as public policy ensures
civic unity.” Removing incentives to
learn English does not help ensure our civic unity. Instead, such policies discourage
assimilation and encourage the formation of isolated immigrant communities that
are outside the main street of American life.
The violence that has broken out in immigrant neighborhoods across
Now
for the record, we want to say that our organization strongly supports the
rights of all citizens to vote, but the relatively few citizens who cannot
understand English have the same remedies to help them vote that millions of
English speaking illiterates have. They
can request an absentee ballot to get help to understand it. They can take a crib sheet or a premarked
paper ballot with them when they vote.
And they have the right to take an interpreter into the poll with
them. The law states, “a voter who
requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to
read or write may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice. There are remedies available to non-English
speaking voters regardless of whether they live in a covered jurisdiction or
regardless of whether or not they happen to be a member of one covered
group. They are more than adequate to
protect the right of qualified voters who have difficulty reading and
understanding English to cast a ballot.
Finally,
I want to say that requiring citizens to vote using ballots in English
discriminates against no one on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national
origin. No matter how you try, you
cannot equate these terms with the language someone speaks. English is spoken as a first language by
people of every race, of every ethnicity, by dozens of national origins,
English is the official language of 51 different nations and most of which are
located in
I
just wanted to thank all of you for this opportunity to talk to you. Like I said, I do live in a place, in a city,
actually. I really love my city,
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you very much. I think it was very well stated. Thank you.
MS. MORENO: Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Alright.
Let me call up the panel that was designated as third panel: Rosalind
Gold, Mary Anne Foo, and EunSook Lee.
Panelists’s choice. I don’t have
a preference of order, so . . .
MS. MARY ANNE FOO: Good afternoon. My name is Mary Anne Foo, and I'm the
executive director of the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community
Alliance. We’re a non-profit
community-based organization conducting voter education and other social
service activities in
Our
community has overwhelmingly utilized the bilingual materials. So I know that Supervisory Chris Norby had
stated that in the last election very few had requested information, but I
think he was talking about the special election, if I’m not mistaken, because
he said less than 10,000. But, according
to the Orange County Register, the Orange County Register newspaper on
November 7 as well as the Orange County Registrar that actually about 46,000 of
just Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese alone requested bilingual
information. That doesn’t even count the
Spanish language. So that means that 41
percent of Korean voters, Korea born voters, 28 percent of those born in Chinese
speaking countries, and 53 percent of Vietnamese born voters requested bilingual
information. So it’s quite a bit and you
can see the great need.
Since
the Chinese and Korean language materials are only instituted starting in 2001,
I believe that more will request information in their native language once they
know more about the availability. Also,
in the last election in
I
want to share a personal story. In the
most recent election, the propositions were really confusing and difficult to
understand. I’m fourth generation. I was born here. My family’s been here since 1861. I have a master’s degree and yet some of the
propositions I still have clue what they meant, and their impact on
The
Spanish ballot gave him a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of what the
proposition was saying. From there he
decided I’m going to change my mind. He
is very thankful that he got that sample ballot in Spanish, because he said now
he’s able to make an informed decision when voting. If he had voted the other way and found out
later that he had voted the way that he did not want to, he would have been
very disappointed.
And
it also helped me, because he was able to explain that proposition to me after
reading it in Spanish, so that I would understand it, as well. And even though he’s fluent in English, even
though he’s been here for 25 years, sometimes the English especially on the
ballot, is very difficult. That in line
sample ballot gave him the opportunity to truly understand the propositions he
was voting on rather than be influenced by a campaign that had money to send
mailers and make phone calls.
Section
203 of the Voting Rights Act enables citizens to truly understand their ballot
by providing challenging information in their native language and enhancing
one’s understanding. It enables all
citizens to have the same understanding and opportunity to make an informed
decision. I really, really urge you to
really support and work with the federal government to reauthorize the Voting
Rights Act to ensure that all Americans have the same equal opportunity to
civic participation.
And I
just wanted to make one more comment about Supervisor Chris Norby’s
statement. He had kept, he had
repeatedly said that he was concerned about the inciting of anti-immigrant
sentiment, because people would feel that we’re spending so much tax money on
trying to get these information in bilingual and most people won’t want
it. I actually would like to counter
that, because I think that one, I don’t think that we would incite
anti-immigrant sentiment. I think
especially if we put it in a pro, a very positive way that everyone, all of
these community members pay taxes just like everyone else. They’re all citizens. Providing this information really will truly
help people have more voters. We’ll get
more voters out. They’ll be able to make
an informed decision, and it would be more fair.
Also,
his comments that it cost 596,000 in
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
And I think we’ll just go from one side to the others.
MS. ROSALIND GOLD: Good afternoon, Chairperson
Bowen. I’m Rosalind Gold. I’m with the National Association of Latino
Elected and Appointed Officials. That’s
NALEAO Educational Fund. And I want to thank
you both for the opportunity to testify about the federal Voting Rights Act and
its impact on California and for all the leadership that you’ve been showing on
making California’s democracy stronger.
Our
organization has a constituency of more than 6,000 elected and appointed officials
nationwide, and about 1,200 of those are form
Now
our organization supports reauthorization of all of the key provisions of the
Voting Rights Act, but my testimony I just want to focus today on Section 203
and how it’s increased Latino access to the electoral process. From our voter engagement work and from our
policy research, I want to start off by giving you a portrait of the Latino
community in
If we
look at the number of Latino elected officials, it grew from 460 in 1984. In January, 2005, it’s about 1,080. And in our state, Latinos are serving at the
highest levels of office. In the state
legislature, about one out of four of our state legislators in
But,
there is another face of the Latino community in
If we
look back at the reason that Congress first enacted Section 203, it recognized
that lack of equal access to educational opportunities and linguistic obstacles
excluded language minorities from full participation and essentially denied
them the right to vote. And these
challenges really still exist for
We
know that both state legislators and nationally still recognize the achievement
gap. I mean, Congress and the President
enacted the No Child Left Behind Act specifically to close the achievement gap
between students of different educational backgrounds and different
socioeconomic levels. So the fact that
there is still lack of equal educational access in California and the nation is
something that Congress has recognized, and something we think that the Voting
Rights Act in Section 203 still needs to address.
And
for Latino community, this is particularly important, because so many Latino
voters are naturalized citizens. If we
look at the November, 2004, election, about 32 percent of Latino citizens who
voted were naturalized. That’s about one
out of three, and, yeah, this is a growing segment of our electorate. And basically these citizens use language
assistance to access the electoral process.
And this is going to continue to be important. For example, you know, you heard everybody
talk about the difficulty of our language materials. I just quickly—a picture is worth a thousand
words. Just wanted to hold up our voter
pamphlet from our last statewide election.
And when we look ____ 2006, many of our jurisdictions are going to have
new voting equipment because of the requirements of the Help America Vote Act
of 2002, HAVA, and in some cases voters are going to have to vote on equipment
that is new or more complicated. So this
is another reason that Section 203 and language assistance is really important.
I
just wanted to talk quickly about some of the things we’ve learned from our own
voter engagement work. Since September,
2004, we’ve operated a toll-free voter information hotline. It’s called Ve Vota, Go Vote. And we’ve received about 9,000 calls from
California Latino voters. And many of
our callers have relayed stories of some of the problems that they have
experienced at the polling place.
They’ve talked about, again, what it feels like to be a first time voter
and not to be familiar with basic election procedures or how to use the
equipment. And to come into a polling
place and be treated rudely or unfairly by a poll worker because you needed
language assistance or you requested language assistance, and how frustrating
it was to really not be able to exercise your right to vote because you were
seen as a problem voter. Clearly this is
maybe not something that widespread, but it still happening too often and we
still need to continue to better work with our election officials and also work
with the folks that enforce Section 203 to keep having improvements in how
language assistance is implemented.
In
one of the earlier panels there was some discussion about enhancements to the
Voting Rights Act and things that might be done to strengthen it. In addition to the comments about lowering
the threshold, we would also recommend that the census data that’s used to
determine which jurisdictions are subject to the language assistance
requirement be changed from just the long form census which is taken every 10
years. Basically the Census Bureau is
now implementing the American Community Survey, which is a rolling survey. And as a result of the American Community
Survey, we should be able to do these determinations and update these
determinations every five years. And so
we think that actually should also be built into the reauthorization of the
Voting Rights Act.
SENATOR BOWEN: I mean, is that something that counties could
use now if they were in between censuses if they wanted to try to get a better
handle on who they were providing what materials to?
MS. GOLD:
The way that the ACS works is that is has to be going on a
certain number of years before you get down to small enough sample size to get
data. So I think, depending on the
counties’ sizes, there could be some counties that could use it right now. Probably by 2008 all of the counties in the
SENATOR BOWEN: I mean, clearly from the provisions that the
feedback that Mr. Norby provided, you know, you want to try to be as accurate
and targeted as you can in any election material. But, I would point out that that actually
happens not just with regard to language issues, but it certainly happens with
regard to kinds of mail that people get from private campaigns. I know I represent
MS. GOLD: Well, certainly, this is not the issue we’re
here to address, but we also support full funding of the Census Bureau’s
efforts to make the American community survey really to keep it fully implemented
over the next couple of years. There’s
been some threats to that funding just this year. We think they’ve been resolved, but you know,
we do urge another thing that the California Legislature can do is to send a
strong message to support the full implementation of the ACS. And with respect to some of the targeting
you’re talking about, we also know that election officials, when they work with
community based organizations and many election officials--you’ll be hearing
from Conny McCormack—have very good, strong programs to that. That also assists them with the targeting, as
well. And we encourage that.
SENATOR BOWEN: I just, again, I think ____ making that no
targeting is ever done whether it be private or government is ever 100 percent
accurate. If it was, my dog would not
have received a credit card application.
And that’s just for starters. He
does not receive voter materials, I want to assure everyone. Just credit card applications.
MS. GOLD: How’s his credit line? I hope it’s—
SENATOR BOWEN: You know, I didn’t know he had one, but I also
didn’t know that he needed contact lenses or that he was interested in opening
an investment account at Solomon Smith Barney until I started reading his mail. (LAUGHTER) Anyway, I’m sorry, we’re ____ track.
MS. GOLD: Well, no, that’s fine. And actually, you know, this is great as a
way for me just to inclusion—in conclusion, really talk about first of all
commending the Legislature already for the action you’ve taken with respect to
the resolution passed on the Voting Rights Act.
And also ask you to continue to send a very strong message to Congress
and the President about how important the reauthorization of the Voting Rights
Act is. And to call on California’s
members of Congress to hold regional hearings, and just make a, send a message
that we have another opportunity to make our state’s democracy stronger, to
make sure it remains strong and representative to all of our citizens’ voices,
and we hope you’ll join us in this effort.
Thank you very much.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
And last but not least on this panel, Ms. Lee.
MS. LEE:
Good afternoon and thank you. My name is EunSook Lee and I’m the executive
director of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium or
NKASEC for short. We were established in
1994 as the consortium by local community centers that realized the need by
coming together to build a national movement in progressive Korean American
voice for social justice. Our ____
priorities since our formation have been immigrant rights and immigration
reform, as well as other major civil rights issues including voting
rights. Hence, for the last decade,
NKASEC and our three affiliates in
I’m
here this afternoon to state our support for the reauthorization of the three
key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that are scheduled to expire in August,
2007. And furthermore, we’re seeking to
see those provisions strengthened through the expansion of coverage. The Voting Rights Act is widely understood to
be the nation’s most effective civil rights legislation. It breaks down the barriers and opens up the
democratic process to all eligible voters.
Key provisions authorizing the federal government to monitor polling
places and specifically Section 203 which requires counties to provide
multilingual materials and services to certain language minority voting groups
have an instrumental in enabling Asian-Pacific American voters to vote free
from discrimination.
As a
result, the Voting Rights Act has contributed to the noticeable increase in the
electoral participation of Korean Americans and Asian Pacific American voting
population. Korean-Americans as minority
population number now at 1.2 million according to the 2000 census. And of course the largest majority of them
are in
The
short profile that I provide shows that as a voting population, Korean
Americans are ethic minority voters, immigrant voters, limited English
proficient voters, and new voters. For
this reason, Section 203 coupled with other provisions in the Voting Rights Act
ensures that Korean American voters are not discriminated and that language
access is appropriately provided.
Currently, the Korean language is covered in three counties,
Broadly,
the shortcomings have also included the failure of certain counties to
translate all materials, to translate inaccurately, or not in a timely
manner. On an election day, polling
places have had two few interpreters or missing multilingual materials. It is for this reason that our organization
and other Asian Pacific American organizations have worked ____ counties to
advocate for full compliance as well as to donate our services to increase the
number of poll workers or to review translated materials.
In
short, our communities have developed strong working relationships with local
county registrar offices because we share the common goal of ensuring full
access to minority voters. As we
approach the sunset date for key provisions in the Voting Rights Act with
regard to Section 203, we understand that there are several proposals to
decrease the threshold for coverage from 10,000 to 7,500 or even to 5,000
voters. Currently Section 203 covers
counties that are five percent of 10,000 voting age citizens who speak the same
language are LEP, limited English proficient, and as a group, a higher
illiteracy rate than the national illiteracy rate.
In
our opinion, measures that will allow counties to capture as many language
minority voters as possible are both meaningful and necessary. For this reason, we reiterate our support
for, first, the reauthorization of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act, and
second, we seek to strengthen these provisions by expansion of coverage for
language minority voters under Section 203.
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
And I think that’s actually a perfect segue into hearing from Conny
McCormack, because it’s, I think, been very clear from the testimony today that
one of the things that really needs to happen is good relationships between the
County Registrar of Voters and the voters themselves. I think, we’ve heard a great deal about the
fact that voting is not a mechanical process. It actually involves a lot of human beings,
many of whom don’t spend their time 365 days a year working on running the
polls. They are doing something else. They come in as a volunteer, or you’ll
probably tell us a little bit about how else you find all of the people who
spend election day working at the polls and working behind the scenes doing
everything else that needs to be done.
But, it’s pretty clear that outreach is a big part of this and also
clear from the testimony that
So,
thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. And I’m looking forward to hearing
specifically about what’s happening in
MS. CONNY McCORMACK: Thank you, Senator Bowen, and
thank you for the invitation to appear before your committee today and to the
staff for all their work in the past. We
really have a good working relationship, and we’re very pleased with that.
I
really appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to you a little bit about
what we do in
As
you know,
As
has been said by many of the speakers,
And I
would like to thank the community partners that I work with very hard and
that’s many of whom are here today, Margo Reeg with the League of Women Voters,
Kathay Feng with, used to be with
And
what do we do with those? One of the
things we do is the requests on file. We
advertise that it’s available, and every sample ballot there’s a page that it
described availability to get the sample ballot in whatever language you would
like in that language very prominently displayed in our sample ballot. Because of that we have 135,000 requests on
file and when there are significant requests on file in a precinct, at least
20, we target that precinct for oral assistance. Additionally, when the community-based
organizations indicate to us this is an area, because immigrant patterns
change. The census gets out of date
pretty fast in a multi-ethnic community.
And those community based organizations know the need, and they come in
and say, these precincts, we know we have a need. And so we then add those precincts to the
list for oral assistance.
Another
thing we do is called a multilingual tally card. And I’m proud to say that 96 percent of our
poll workers fill this card out. We ask
them to tally every time they get a request for an oral assistance in a
language. If there’s at least five in a
precinct, we add that precinct to having a requirement to have a person who
speaks that language. Let me try to
quantify that a little bit. Take the
November of 2004 election. And I’ve got
all this in charts all in my testimony that I won’t ask you to memorize. But, for Chinese in November 2004 election,
we had 170 of our 4,865 precincts that were legally required by the census to
provide oral assistance in Chinese.
Well, with the input of the community based organizations, the
multilingual tally cards from the past and the cards on file for Chinese, we
expanded that to 424 precincts. So you
can see that’s well over double the number that we’re legally required.
Well,
how did we do? I mean, how do we measure
our success? Did we recruit poll workers
who spoke that language? Well, as our
chart indicates, we recruited 398 for 93 percent success. And we have that in all of our different
languages. So, we couldn’t do this
without the input and collaboration of the community groups. Is it easy?
I know Kathay Feng said, you know, a lot of the, it’s not that
difficult. I quoted her as saying, “not
that difficult to recruit people who speak these languages.” It’s difficult to recruit anyone to be a poll
worker. They may pay $70 in
We
have over 400 training classes for our poll workers throughout the community
for every major election. Many of those
have specific translators at them and we target them and note which ones are
going to have ability to have a translator there to assist the poll worker
training in that language.
We
also have a cultural sensitivity component.
It is difficult when you hear it.
Occasionally someone has a prejudicial remark, but we give the
training. We explain the
importance. We explain the law that this
material has to be out there. And we
take action against poll workers who have violated that trust of ours. We counsel or we remove depending on what’s
appropriate, so we do not ignore when we hear a complaint. And all of us get complaints. We take action on them. And I think that’s--
SENATOR BOWEN: We’re human beings. When we reach perfection, you know, I think .
. .
MS. McCORMACK: I think the important thing
is to know that we take action on it. We
don’t just ignore it and say, oh well, that’s too bad. The person was willing to work. We don’t do that. We counsel them if they’re capable of being
brought up to appropriate level of sensitivity.
And if they’re not, we thank them for their former service and we move
on. In every election we have some in
that category. It’s just the way it is. So, we, again, we think our multi, or
four-pronged approach really gets to the need.
Another
thing we’ve identified, and it’s been mentioned here today, is other languages
that are not legally required, but we know there’s a need. We know there’s areas of town—
Again,
how do we measure success? How do we get
the word out? We get the word out
through our sample ballot book, through an advertising campaign. We had never had any money to do an
advertising campaign until the November, 2004 presidential election with help
of the Help America Vote Act funds. And
the Secretary of State who did assist us in getting those funds to us, it made
a huge difference. We were able to run
an advertising campaign of about $2 million: bus placards, newspaper ads, radio
ads, and we had a 79 percent voter turnout in the presidential election in
SENATOR BOWEN: ____ the campaign was for voters generally.
MS. McCORMACK: It was got getting the vote out, it was for
telling people what their options were to vote.
They could vote absentee, they could vote early on the touch screen
which has the language built in. Very
easy and a lot of our language people, needs assistance in
So we
take out legal compliance very seriously.
We think it’s very important.
Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s
difficult. And we want our program to be
sustainable. So we have full time staff
assigned to our multilingual program. We
have two full-time staff people who work in this area non-stop. I mean, yes, we do have a large staff, but
for the size of the jurisdiction we are, we need, we recognize there is a
need. And we think it needs to be
filled.
I’d
like to just make one or two comments about the logistics of counting the vote,
because there’s been some questions about that today. And there’s a lot of people out there who
really don’t think that after the election night is over that we’re still
counting ballots. It’s always a
surprise. I always get even calls from
the media. We were still counting up to
two and three weeks after until we finalize.
And I think that’s a real respect for the vote and everyone should know
and it’s open to the public that come in.
It’s a totally transparent process to come in and see that we’re still
going through the absentees. We’re still
signature checking, getting them out of the envelopes. The provisionals—we're still assessing if
they’re eligible to vote or not.
We
have over three or 400,000 of these ballots in
SENATOR BOWEN: So you have to go through all of the absentee
ballots—
MS. McCORMACK: Because we count them by ballot style and not
by precinct, but the machine can pull out the ballot style. And once we get the
ballot style, then we can break it down, because we know which race is on which
ballot style. So, yes, it’s
tedious. Yes, it’s difficult. It would be very difficult to do it by
precinct on the front end, because that’s a lot of front end processing.
SENATOR BOWEN: Yeah, actually had a question just on Saturday
from someone. It’s a little off from
today, but I’ll raise it publicly and then we can continue the conversation
later. It was from somebody who had
worked as a precinct captain who said I can’t tell who in my precinct voted
absentee, because, and we can’t tell how those votes were cast, because—
MS. McCORMACK: We can tell who they are. We don’t know how they were cast.
SENATOR BOWEN: Right, so we can’t tell the results of our
organizing work in our own precinct, because of the way the absentee ballots
were ____ just occurred to me—
MS. McCORMACK: They’re counted by ballot style, because it’s
easier. There were how many ballot
styles for this election? Four or five
hundred compared to 2,700 precincts and usually 5,000. We did consolidations. To do the front end of that and mail them out
that way creates huge front end problem, and but the back end, we can pull them
out of the ballot style and if there’s a race and we know which precincts,
we’re going to go in and find the ones in that race. We won’t be able to tie it back to which
precinct, except for the ____ we won’t know, because it’s a ballot. Let’s say there’s 15 absentee ballots. We don’t know which one you voted or you
voted. But, we can go in when we do a
recount and pull every ballot that’s in that race, and we do that. And we will do that for this one recount and
we may have some others. We have a
couple other close races. So it’s a
logistical problem, but it’s not impossible.
But, on the front end, it’s really hard.
SENATOR BOWEN: How do you pull those ballots after they’re
out of the absentee envelope and maintain confidentiality?
MS. McCORMACK: Well, we know the ballot style, like if you’re
in that ballot style with those races, then you would find that race, because
it would be that number on the ballot, and then you just don’t know which voter
it is. Of course, you don’t want
to. It’s supposed to be a secret
ballot.
And
another comment in terms of making sure that every vote is counted—I think
there was a lot of controversy after the November, 2004, election around the
country when provisional voting was allowed for the first time in many places
we’ve had it for decades in
But,
that’s important. That would have been
60—in some states that would have been 65,000 people would have lost their vote
for president, propositions, statewide races, and all the races down to board
of supervisors, down to California Senate.
People should have a right to have their vote counted if they made a
mistake and got to the wrong precinct. I
think it’s a good law. It is
logistically very difficult, but I wanted, I think registrars always get
accused of being such whiners. To let
you know, I think that’s important. It
does take a lot of time and why our canvas takes several weeks after the
election, because that’s when we do all of that. But, those votes all counted in
And I
think HAVA’s going to make a huge difference, too, because HAVA, the, any over
voting going on in a precinct, and we’re trying to get our voting equipment
certified for our ____ vote upgrade in
SENATOR BOWEN: Wrong end of the stylus.
MS. McCORMACK: And that will all, that will all come back to
them and I think that’s really important.
And I’m really hoping that the Legislature can help us move a little bit
toward making sure we get these certified systems, because we, so we can all be
HAVA compliant. Because that was the
goal of HAVA, to make sure that every vote counts. And it will make a huge difference in
Anyway,
I’ve said way too much. I would like to
open it up for questions and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you
today.
SENATOR BOWEN: I just have a couple questions about the
translations, because it seems to me that one of the things that helps is if
you can use translation at the state level, obviously where you’re dealing with
initiatives that will be on every ballot, so that counties don’t have to redo—
MS. McCORMACK: We do not in
SENATOR BOWEN: Do you know if other counties—
MS. McCORMACK: You know, I’ve heard, but I haven’t had it
corroborated that there could have been some other changes in other
counties. We feel if the state, of
course, obviously, as a state certified translator, and now with the beauty of
electronics, we can make sure that we get the exact wording that’s in the state
pamphlet. We have no desire to make any
changes. And we don’t make changes, so
we just go ahead and so which has really cut our costs for this past
election. But, then there’s so many
costs we have to translate for the local ballot designation and local
propositions and other types of materials.
But, we go ahead and use the state and we have not had a complaint about
that to date.
SENATOR BOWEN: And are there other places where the
translations, for example your work with Cambodian voters, Armenian,
Russian. I know those are significant
populations in
MS. McCORMACK: We’re not, Senator, we're not doing formal
translations of any of the propositions.
All we’re doing—
SENATOR BOWEN: I'm just talking about how you register. Your basic—that’s what I’m calling basic.
MS. McCORMACK: We put up on our website—it’s very basic, how
to register and all. I think, I don’t
know whether or not the state web site has that on there, but I think it would
be a good idea if they did. In terms of
providing more like the state translations of, of course that would be, as we
know, expensive, and—
SENATOR BOWEN: It’s cheaper to do it once than to do it more
than once. That’s—
MS. McCORMACK: Yes, we’re providing some basics in those
other languages, and any time a community comes forward, we invite them onto
our community Voter Outreach Committee and we try to get assistance so that we
can work on it together with them and get it up on the website and then get the
word out to people. Because getting the
word out is key. It’s not much good if
this information’s available and nobody knows about it. So we focus a lot on our getting the word out
part of our program which that branches of the tree really makes a huge
difference.
SENATOR BOWEN: And do you, are you finding that there
is—what’s the relationship between the request for oral assistance and the
request for translated materials? I know
for some people who are operating in a language that’s not their first
language, one may be easier than the other.
I mean, I think typically, I think it’s easier for people to read than
to speak in another language.
MS. McCORMACK: Well, that’s the good thing about—
SENATOR BOWEN: That’s certainly true of my Spanish.
MS. McCORMACK: My Spanish is better on reading it, but I’m
terrible on the speaking of it. I just
went to
SENATOR BOWEN: Well, that’s not Spanish.
MS. McCORMACK: I know, that’s what I found out. It was so different. The situation with that is that we have the
written materials available. We prefer
to get them mailed to people so they have them in advance. That’s the 135,000. And we advertise that and when people call up
and say I’d like to get it, we add them to the file. And you’re going to get it in the future,
because we do have it at the polling place, but that’s kind of the wrong time
to start reading these long propositions, although it’s available if anybody
wants to read it then. I think for the
oral assistance, it’s a lot of mechanical assistance. How to use the voting equipment, how to, you
know, how do I do this? And I think
that’s absolutely crucial and we have a requirement for our poll workers to
show the voters how to use the equipment before they issue the ballot, because
people need to know how to use the equipment even if they say, eh, I used it
before. Well, you know, it’s been a
while. Maybe you need to look at it
again, so I think that’s why it’s really important to have the oral
assistance. What am I, you know, how do
I do this? How do I make this
happen? What do I do with my ballot? How do I sign in? What am I supposed to do? And that’s pretty mechanics, but—
SENATOR BOWEN: I actually just saw a very interesting little
study that showed that when you’re using new voting equipment that what
happened in communities where people have less of a history of voting is they
actually went, studied the equipment, learned how to use it. People in more affluent communities when
confronted with touch screen and other electronic systems tend to just say, oh,
I know how to do that. It’s just one
more electronic device. And the result
was the error rate was much greater in those communities where people didn’t
take the time, because they just assumed it would, yeah, a little bit of
arrogance, I think. Gee, if I can use a cell
phone and a Blackberry, and whatever, I don’t need to be, you know, to learn
this. So I think that what that really
shows is that time spent with the mechanics of it actually does help. So you’re finding that the oral translation
is often just the mechanics of what do I do?
MS. McCORMACK: And I think it’s also, and I think you might
have heard this from some of the other panelists, I think it’s important for
when people come into vote for the first time, let’s face it. They’re kind of intimidated. It’s a new experience. To see a polling place that reflects the
community. We’ve really worked in
The
polling place is a changed environment than what it used to be, and by putting
new equipment out there which we all are doing, I think it’s very important
that the lesson is that let everyone get it, wait a minute, you can’t get your
ballot until you see how to use it. I
know it seems a little bit, we had some people resist it, but in the end, I
think it makes a big, big difference.
SENATOR BOWEN: How many volunteers do you have—let me not
call them volunteers, although I did this for a number of years and I think I
got paid $30 a day and always considered myself a volunteer. How many people do you have who get paid $55
a day on election day, and who decides the required training, otherwise have
nothing to do with elections for the rest of the year? What’s the sheer number of people in
MS. McCORMACK: For the November, 2004, election which we had
the biggest turnout we’ve ever had and the most poll workers we’d ever
hired. We hired just over 30,000 poll
workers. But, I call them volunteers,
because when you’re getting $55, that’s a very tiny stipend. We do pay.
We started a couple years ago paying $25 to go to class. We also had 82 percent of our poll workers go
to class. And before we started paying
that, that’s an investment. We don’t
need poll workers who say, ah, I’ve been doing that for years and all then all
these new rules come in and mistakes occur.
And so that $25 has made a difference, and we have some people, even
though they don’t get paid twice, will go to the class twice, because it’s
complicated and they really want t learn.
So, we have a huge turn out at our classes and we’re really proud of
that, and we think it makes a difference to pay that little bit extra rather
than to pay it just for serving. We pay
that extra if you get trained. So our
Board of Supervisors gave us that authority a couple years ago.
SENATOR BOWEN: So, and that’s, when you talk about paying the
poll workers who are bilingual, seems to me that probably the biggest
difficulty is in finding them. After
that they’re receiving the same training and that everyone else does.
MS. McCORMACK: And the same stipend. Yes, that’s correct.
SENATOR BOWEN: Alright.
Well, it always amazes me that our electoral system works as well as it
does for all of its warts and places where things happen and where people say
things that you weren’t expecting. This
country has a pretty amazing history of taking a concept called democracy and
making sure that people actually exercise their right to vote. So, we continue to work on that, but thank
you for coming to talk about what L.A. is doing and particularly thank you for
the charts and graphs. And maybe it’s
just me, but I find that it’s really useful to actually get a sense, a graphic
sense of what it is that we’re talking about.
I find it helps me put it in perspective.
MS. McCORMACK: Thank you.
I appreciated the opportunity.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
We do have a number of people. I
think we have six people who have signed up to testify on this subject
matter. So since it’s a small number of
people, let me just read the list of names and you could come up to the
microphones so that your testimony is recorded.
And we’ll go in the following order and as with the panelists, if I have
mispronounced your name, I will try to limit the mispronunciation one time, and
if you try to correct me, I will try to get it done second and subsequent
tries.
Our
first public commenter is Larry Gilbert, then we will welcome Don Marshall, Bill
Morrelli, Julio Giron, Betty—is it “Shaneberg” or “Shoneberg”? “Schoenberg”.
And Chuck Schoenberg.
MR. LARRY GILBERT: _____.
SENATOR BOWEN: As long as the red light’s
on, you are good to go.
MR. GILBERT: Good afternoon, Honorable
Senator Bowen and staff. My name is
Larry Gilbert, a resident of
In
his
In HR
1, the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush also acknowledged the need to
assist disadvantaged students to read and learn English. In July of 2002, Our Cutting Edge, a talk
show program, covered former Treasurer Rosario Amarens No Child Left Behind
presentation at
General
Counsel Brian Jones said one reason for kids dropping out is a lack of reading
proficiency. Obviously the
multi-language ballots are not helping with respect to English proficiency. What makes the case at
I am
certain that those voting citizens are proud of being Americans and can read
the English version ballots with full comprehension. There’s no question that
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
Mr. Marshall?
MR. DON MARSHALL: Yes, my name is Don
Marshall. I’m a citizen of
Common
sense is the fact that the
The
only solution that I can see that would be a benefit by adding more languages
and dialects to the ballot box would be to add all dialects and all languages
throughout the country. I mean as far as,
you know, we’re a melting pot of different languages and melting pots in the
hundreds, maybe thousands. You know,
when you consider all the different dialects from
I’m
obviously for English only, because as people have said earlier today and I
won’t go through it again, when you become an American citizen, you’re supposed
to read, write, and understand the English language. By allowing different languages and different
dialects to be put on the ballot, you’re simplifying the fact that all they
have to do is more or less just, in my opinion, they’re just going to have to
memorize a certain amount of information to pass the test to be on, to be an
American citizen, and at that point, once they are an American citizen, they
never have to use the English language again if they so choose. You simplify that by adding dialects to
it. By making them learn the English
language, you have a unified language.
Everything runs smoother and an example would be like our military. In our military case, whether it be Air
Force, Navy, you know, we have a bunch of personnel that are from different
countries that are different dialects, different languages and what not. You don’t have a Captain Ramirez reporting in
Spanish in a war zone to a Sergeant Kim in Spanish and Sergeant Kim’s
responding in Indonesian. It’s all
English and it works like a fine oil watch.
And
in closing the last example I would use would be this meeting that we had
today. I looked out here and I saw
African-Americans, I saw Asian-Americans, I saw American Indians, European
Americans. We all spoke our piece and we
all gave our presentations in English.
It was cordial, it was courteous, it was respectful. The responses were all in English. If we can do it at this level, there’s no
excuse why we can’t do it at the state level or the national level or in any
level in between.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
MR. BILL MORRELLI: My name’s Bill Morrelli. And I’d like to thank you for the opportunity
to speak. I’ve been extremely troubled
by this meeting this morning, because I started out as a business trouble
shooter back in the 1960s. And I applied
the laws of this nation and did what I thought, saw my Uncle Will who I’m named
after, my middle name, United States Congressman for 18 years. And I helped a lot of clients become
millionaires, only to see them lose it all.
And my anger wound up putting me, because I was one of those Enron type
accountants before it became popular, in the Colorado State Penitentiary. And while I was setting in solitary
confinement, I started reading the Bible that my religious family had, and
found things that my religious family had never bothered to teach me.
And
at that time, I started because I have a distant relative who was a signer of
the Declaration of Independence, read the first paragraph. I read the whole thing, but the first
paragraph just jumped off the page at me.
But, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to
assume among the powers of the earth to separate, separate and equal station to
which the laws of nature and nature’s god entitled them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the
separation. Then I started a search for
what those laws of nature are, and what I heard this morning is the
misapplication of those laws which have led to the demise and the problems with
the all of the minorities that are demanding the equal station without
consideration of what the, their demand is really involved.
And
to add to what Larry Gilbert had to say about President Theodore Roosevelt’s
problems, at the time that he made the statement Mr. Gilbert quoted, he was
having a terrible problem with the hyphenated Americans—the German-Americans,
the Irish-Americans, and the Native Americans.
He left out Italian-Americans.
That was my great granddad. He
was still around for a few years after I was born, and granddad, he couldn’t
speak English. And he had a real problem
with voting. But, what he did was he
felt he was responsible to understand these, so he sat down with his neighbors
and his family and he went over everything himself. He didn’t look at—want to put a burden on the
taxpayers to make it available for him.
He was extremely grateful for being able to be here and have the freedom
to abide by them laws of nature which he didn’t bother to teach me. (LAUGHTER) And what I heard this morning also proved
that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Patrick Henry, and George Washington to be
prophets, but sadly, in a negative way.
Patrick Henry had a real concern and real fear of what the judges would
do if they chose to do their own thing the way the thing was set up and we got
a real problem going on in this country with legislation by court, the Supreme
Court, today. John Adams—
SENATOR BOWEN: Sir, if I might, can I ask you to focus on the
hearing just because I have other—
MR. MORRELLI: I am, ma'am, I am. Because what I hear going on is that and this
whole situation is I’ve heard the word “discrimination” a lot of times
today. But, it’s all talking about the
color of this guy that side of the hand.
The color of the skin or the nation where from, it’s not talking about
the inside. It’s not talking—it’s
talking about the language that we use, but words are spirit and they’re either
life of death, breath. They’re either
good or ill, good will/ill will. But,
each language can be divided into two parts.
Good, benefits, blessings, welfare, and the ill will, evil, words that
cause calamity, distress, injury, misery, pestilence, ruin. And I’ve seen that happen throughout my life
and it really came into effect with the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Almost half of my graduating class from
Douglas County High School in
Castlerock, Colorado, were, would be today considered Latino. But, they weren’t considered Latino at that point. That never came into effect until the Civil
Rights Act of 1968. And what I’ve heard
is everybody discriminating the facts or looking at things from a standpoint of
discrimination rather than penetrating the real, the appearance of things to
the real absolute truth.
When
we qualify the facts in order to justify our position and take advantage or our
neighbor, we violate the law of nature of nations, love your neighbor as
yourself, and do unto other as you would have them do unto you. And we wind up causing ourselves some real
serious problems, because it was the violation of that law that caused me to
guide over 150 people to become millionaires, only to have them lose it
all. And the real cause of the problem
going on in this nation is that we have gotten caught up and we have actually
proved Theodore Roosevelt a prophet when he said the one absolutely certain way
of bringing this nation to ruin of preventing all possibility of it continuing
to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling
nationalities. George Washington spent
over half of his farewell speech talking about the spirit of party. And we now have all kinds of parties. We call them public corporations, private
corporations, special interest groups, and all pushing their own program. And when we get to the point that we’ve got
to divide our nation some more, by bringing all these different languages into
effect and running up the taxpayers’ cost, the one thing I haven’t heard this
morning is the concern for the taxpayers whose got to pay the bill for
this.
And
right now in the State of
SENATOR BOWEN: Sir, could you wrap up?
MR. MORRELLI: I’m wrapping it up.
SENATOR BOWEN: Okay, thank you. I just wanted to give everyone an opportunity
to be heard.
MR. MORRELLI: There were 17 articles to the Bill of Rights
in the Confederation of States. The
Constitution was adopted without a Bill of Rights. And then they picked up 10. We call them amendments. But, it’s the seven that were cut out by the
spirits of party of which John Adams and Thomas Jefferson once were played
roles in the founding of those two parties which George Washington warned all
the, everybody to avoid at all cost. And
now ____ the political parties are using the very subsistence of the people to
control their will in the form of education, in the form of finances, in order
to get the parties way. Thank you for
letting me speak.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
MS. SCHOENBERG: I’m going to be real—
SENATOR BOWEN: Okay, actually, I’m going in the order I
announced. I think Mr. Giron is next,
and then you get the final word.
MS. SCHOENBERG: No, my husband. He signed up.
SENATOR BOWEN: I think he just took his name off the list.
MS. SCHOENBERG: Oh, did you?
SENATOR BOWEN: I think he decided to give you the final
word. Perhaps he’s a wise man.
MS. SCHOENBERG: I get the final word.
SENATOR BOWEN: Well.
MR. GIRON: Buenos tardes. Good afternoon. My name is Julio Giron. I’m a resident of the
I
want to start saying the good stuff first.
I don’t see Ms. McCormack in the back of the room. I think we had a well represented in the
Secondly,
I think because the gentleman here talk about the so-called founded fathers, I
respect, because I’m a
Los Angeles
County is not doing bad, but the things on voting could be a lot better and
when I am chairman in all the Senates and this committee I strongly believe I
did approach Ms. McCormack office two weeks prior to the special election that
I how to recognize we lost, as well as the people lost in the 2003 when we won
the recall with our Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Would I still supporting unless he grant that
clemency to that guy who killed four people and he’s supposed to be executed
next week.
Other
than that, I think that reach out to radio.
I radio, I do host and I produce talk radio shows in Spanish on political
and social issues. And I think that the
Latino community is not really begging for being everything bilingual. What happened is and you know as well as I
know, Madam Chairman Bowen, that it is
complicated enough for the people who speak English only and comprehend English
only especially when you have so many propositions on the ballot, when you have
so many ____. I'm glad that tomorrow in
And
I’m proposing and I know these things are being recorded, that it will be
wonderful if in the 58 counties, being our county, Los Angeles County, the
biggest electoral area in the whole country if 10 days before a special
election the public can be reach out with radio shows. Not only with media spots, but with saying
you know for 30 minutes or whatever, Ms. McCormack in conjunction with
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
They didn’t include me, either.
And for the final word.
MS. SCHOENBERG: Okay, this is going to be extremely
short. I realize that you have to be a
And
it’s very, very simple to do that. And
I’m sure that most of us, a lot of us when we read these propositions don’t
understand every word even though we speak English. And you’ve still got to study them and I
would think that they would have someone who could interpret it for them and
that’s all I have to say. Thank you very
much for listening.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Alright, I’d like to thank everyone who came
and participated today. Very interesting
conversation bout the federal Voting Rights Act and what’s at stake and varying
views on what should happen both at the federal level and the state level and
once again, I just want to reiterate that this, as many of the speaker have
said, this really is about the fundamental concept that we call democracy. Pretty phenomenal experiment that began a
long time ago with a much more limited range of participants and we continue to
demonstrate the strength of democracy as a concept by discussing publicly how
to improve it and how to build on what the founding fathers began so many years
ago.
So I
want to thank everyone for participating the at. It is the difference between what we do here
and what happens many other places that we can have a public discussion about
the very rules of engagement and the electoral process. And you are all to be commended for participating
in that. Thank you. This hearing is closed.
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