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The move is required by federal law because at least 5% of Dallas County Vietnamese-speaking citizens who are of voting age have limited English proficiency.

By Charles Scudder and Jessica Huseman/Dallas Morning News

Dallas County will be required to offer election materials and ballots in Vietnamese in the upcoming March 1 primary — the first time a language other than English or Spanish has been offered.

The move is required by federal law because at least 5% of Dallas County Vietnamese-speaking citizens who are of voting age have limited English proficiency.

The Census Bureau notified the county on Dec. 21 of the required change, which, while in keeping with the timeline announced by the Bureau earlier in the year, left the county less than two months to recruit Vietnamese-speaking poll workers, translate voting information and ballots and have Vietnamese-language signs printed for polling places before early voted started last week.

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“It’s a good thing for a sort of stopgap measure until they can figure out where to get more people and where to assign them effectively,” said Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, a senior staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Every U.S. citizen should be able to cast a fully informed ballot, and the way that they can do that is to be able to get that ballot in the language that they can read and understand.

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Dallas County began reaching out to local Vietnamese community groups as soon as they were notified about the new requirement, Solorzano said.

Printed materials, like signs and ballots, were the first to be translated, starting in January. Solorzano said they continue to translate all materials — from social media posts to official voting notices — on a daily basis.

It’s a time-consuming process, especially with the technical and often complicated language of voting. In 2018, for example, a Bexar County notice accidentally translated a message using the Spanish word for “sewage” instead of “runoff.”

“You’ve got to think about the voting context,” Lorenzo-Giguere said. “What did these words mean? Is there an actual translation in that language for each of those words?”

Next, Dallas County began trying to recruit as many Vietnamese-speaking poll workers as possible. It’s hard enough to recruit enough poll workers to run the election without worrying about language, Solorzano said. Now, the county’s recruiting must account for proficiency in three different languages.

“We will have Vietnamese translators in person at vote centers that are in areas with a significant number of Vietnamese speakers,” Solorzano said.

The rest of Dallas’s some 400 locations will be outfitted with cell phones that voters can use to access translators. The swift effort is impressive, Lorenzo-Giguere said, although her organization — AALDEF — will be on site during voting to conduct exit polls and make sure there are no lingering accessibility issues for Vietnamese-speaking voters.

“The signs look good so far,” Lorenzo-Giguere said. “If they can just figure out how to recruit and target the assignment of their bilingual poll workers effectively, that will be sort of a proof of the pudding.”