Thread: For the first time, county prints ballots in Chinese

ELECTIONS: For the first time, county prints ballots in Chinese

By DAVID GARRICK dgarrick@nctimes.com North County Times
58 minutes ago • dgarrick@nctimes.com

Ballots in San Diego County are being printed in Chinese this year for the first time, making political participation easier for one of the county's fastest-growing immigrant populations ---- but also increasing election costs for cities and other government agencies.

Registrar of Voters Deborah Seiler said this week that Chinese became the county's fifth ballot language during the June primary, because the number of Chinese-speaking people in the region had increased beyond thresholds established by the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

According to the American Community Survey, the number of Chinese people in San Diego County increased 22 percent from 2007 to 2010 ---- from 43,352 to 52,740.

Chinese follows Spanish, which was added in 1992, Tagalog, a Filipino language added in 2002, and Vietnamese, which was added in 2004.

Seiler said she's not sure exactly how much adding Chinese has increased ballot costs, which are shared by all the agencies in the county based on how many items they have on the ballot and how many voters they have. For example, cities with multiple initiatives on the ballot pay more.

But Seiler said she spent an extra $270,000 on printing for the June primary, and that her annual payroll has jumped $136,000 because she hired a full-time Chinese language coordinator and two administrative staff members to go over the translations.

She hired 122 poll workers who are bilingual in Chinese and English, and bilingual poll workers receive a $15 surcharge beyond the typical daily pay of $150.

In addition, Seiler said the registrar's office had to update its webpage, reprogram its touch screens and spend money recruiting Chinese-speaking poll workers, who were difficult to find. She said she hadn't yet tabulated those extra costs.

"Chinese was particularly challenging because it's our first character-based language," said Seiler, referring to the pictographs that Chinese uses instead of the letters used by the other four languages. "We also really struggled to find bilingual poll workers."

Participating politically
Many Chinese-Americans are reluctant to participate in the local political process, leaders of the region's Chinese community said this week.

"Many Chinese people haven't been paying attention to the process, so this is a way to have more Chinese people involved," said Dr. Jin Hua, president of the San Diego Chinese American Association. "It's a great change of direction."

David Seid, president of Balboa Park's House of China, said translated ballots make sense based on the local Chinese population's continued increase in recent years.

"It's a way to transition Chinese people into the political process," said Seid. "When you read those propositions, they're hard to understand even without a language barrier."

Sally Wong Avery, president of the Chinese Service Center in Kearny Mesa, said it's about time that Chinese immigrants start getting input into local government.

"This is actually a big thing," she said.

Avery also praised the registrar's office for placing ads about the change in local Chinese newspapers and visiting churches and temples to get the word out. In addition, local Chinese leaders also helped, she said.

"There was quite a cooperative effort in the community to promote this," Avery said.

Dr. Allen Chen, co-founder of the Asian Pacific American Coalition, said having ballots in your native language makes a huge difference.

"To be able to speak English is different than being able to understand all the jargon on the ballot," he said.

A growing population
Chen also said the ballots would be particularly helpful in the city of San Diego, where the Asian population is 17 percent and growing faster than any of the city's other ethnic groups.

Seiler said she couldn't provide the exact criteria the U.S. Census Bureau and the Justice Department used to determine that the county needed to start printing ballots in Chinese.

Justice Department officials declined to comment, but provided a link to their website with general information about voting rights and ballot languages.

Seiler said the criteria included what percentage of the population an ethnic group makes up, how many of those people are U.S. citizens of voting age, and the English literacy rate among them.

Based only on population, the next two languages likely to be added to county ballots are Korean and Japanese, according to the American Community Survey.

But the populations of those groups are much smaller than the number of Chinese Americans, at just less than 20,000 each. And they also aren't increasing in numbers as rapidly as the Chinese.

ELECTIONS: For the first time, county prints ballots in Chinese

Thousands of dollars spent on this. If you come to this country to live, you would think people would learn english. English is the language that ties us all together.