Press Release

A joint letter was sent on June 28 to Attorney General Merrick Garland by members of Congress and civil rights groups, including AALDEF, requesting information about the Justice Department's efforts to enforce the Voting Rights Act for language minority voters. You can read the letter below:

Dear Attorney General Garland,

In the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Congress banned the literacy tests that had been used to disenfranchise Americans since the founding of our country. Through intricate and targeted requirements and arbitrary enforcement, registrars took advantage of systemic educational discrimination to prevent marginalized people from voting. This not only impacted racial minorities, but also people living in poverty, those with disabilities, and, importantly, citizens who spoke languages other than English.

In 1965, Congress enacted the first language access provision of the Voting Rights Act focusing on Puerto Rican voters with limited English proficiency. Section 4(e) of the Voting Rights Act states: “Congress hereby declares that to secure the rights under the fourteenth amendment of persons educated in American-flag schools in which the predominant classroom language was other than English, it is necessary to prohibit the States from conditioning the right to vote of such persons on ability to read, write, understand, or interpret any matter in the English language.” (52 U.S.C. § 10303(e))

In 1975, Congress affirmed that English-only elections effectively constituted a literacy test, and adopted Section 203 into the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, Congress found that “through the use of various practices and procedures, citizens of language minorities have been effectively excluded from participation in the electoral process. The Congress declares that, in order to enforce the guarantees of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, it is necessary to eliminate such discrimination by prohibiting these practices." In recognition of the discrimination in access to education afforded to language-minority Americans, the Voting Rights Act now ensures not just the right to cast a ballot regardless of English-language proficiency, but the *ability* to do so.

In 1982, Congress again amended the Voting Rights Act and acted specifically to protect the rights of limited English proficient voters as well as other voters who require assistance to cast their ballots because of disability or an inability to read the language on the ballot. Congress provided: “Any 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, other than the voter's employer or agent of that employer or officer or agent of the voter's union.” 52 U.S.C.A. § 10508. The legislative history of Section 208 demonstrates that “inability to read or write” includes the inability to read and write because of limited English proficiency.

We have been incredibly grateful to the Biden-Harris Administration for your work enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other efforts to facilitate and protect the American people’s right to vote, including the implementation of the March 7, 2021, Executive Order on Promoting Access to Voting. Similarly, we strongly support the work of Department Of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in encouraging compliance with the law, filing statements of interest to alert the courts to the proper legal requirements of the VRA, brokering consent decrees, dispatching federal monitors, and, alongside the invaluable work of those exercising the VRA’s private right of action, filing enforcement actions. This is especially valuable given the utter lack of enforcement of critical provisions of the VRA under the previous Administration.

We write to encourage you to continue and increase your existing work to use the tools available to you to encourage or compel compliance with Sections 203, 208, and 4(e) of the Voting Rights Act. With that in mind, and with the number of our limited English-speaking constituents increasing exponentially and potentially impacted by these enforcement efforts, we would like more insight into the current status of your work on Sections 203 and 208. Please provide the answers to the following questions:

Section 203

1. What outreach does the Department do to jurisdictions that come anew under Section 203 coverage?

2. How does the Department evaluate a jurisdiction’s compliance with Section 203?

3. What ongoing outreach has the Department done with covered jurisdictions to measure their compliance?

4. If compliance outreach occurs, what information is requested?

a. Does that outreach include asking jurisdictions for lists of bilingual poll workers and registered voters to analyze whether the jurisdiction is assigning its bilingual poll workers to the polling sites where LEP voters are likely to vote and need assistance?

b. Does it include asking the jurisdiction about their recruitment and training of bilingual poll workers who can assist LEP voters?

c. Does it include asking the jurisdiction about any outreach it has made to local community organizations, Tribal Nations where Native American languages are involved, and LEP voters to determine the specific language needs, for example which dialects are needed at which polling sites, or which media platforms would be the most effective in disseminating in-language election information?

d. Does it include asking the jurisdiction to provide copies of all of its written materials and translation guides and recordings of all its oral translations to determine if the translations are complete and accurate?

e. Does it include asking the jurisdiction t[MG3] o provide a list of all its media engagement (e.g., social, print, radio), including copies of the engagement where possible?

5. What are the factors the Department looks for in determining whether a Section 203 violation has occurred?

6. How does the Department engage community members and Tribal Nations directly to assess their language needs, and whether the jurisdiction is in compliance with Section 203?

7. What does the Department do when it determines that a jurisdiction is out of compliance?

8. Is the Department’s observer coverage program used to monitor compliance with Section 203?

a. How does the Department decide which jurisdictions to observe?

b. Has the Department taken any enforcement actions resulting from evidence it has obtained in its poll monitoring program?

9. How many elections must a jurisdiction be out of compliance before the Department determines that seeking voluntary compliance is not an effective enforcement approach?

a. What steps does the Department take to remedy a violation before filing suit?

10. Please provide as much information as possible on any and all Section 203 enforcement actions undertaken since the beginning of the Biden-Harris Administration, including pre-litigation efforts to encourage compliance with Section 203.

11. Does the Department revisit previously sued jurisdictions to ensure that they continue to comply?

12. Does the Department assess whether a covered jurisdiction monitors publicly-disseminated misinformation about elections in covered language(s) in order to publicly correct that misinformation, especially if the jurisdiction engages in such activity with respect to English-language misinformation?

13. Please confirm whether the Department has communicated to certain covered jurisdictions that their obligation to translate election information into a required Native American language is in any way reduced or will not be enforced due to the lack of language minority population in a tribal area overlapping the jurisdiction.

a. Which jurisdictions have received this communication?

b. What are the jurisdictions that received this communication instructed to do if an LEP individual who speaks the covered Native American language is identified?

c. What outreach has the Department done to Tribal Nations whose members are potentially affected by these communications?

d. How is the Department currently protecting the voting rights of LEP members of Tribal Nations?

14. Are there resource, regulatory, case law, or statutory challenges the Department is facing in its efforts to enforce Section 203?

15. What additional statutory protections would allow the Department to ensure equal language access for LEP voters in jurisdictions not captured by Section 203’s coverage formula?

208

1. Many limited English-speaking, low-literate, and voters with disabilities still need assistance to vote. Some of these voters live in jurisdictions that aren’t covered by 203 or speak a language not covered by 203. What is the Department doing to protect these voters?

2. Has the department assessed what states and other jurisdictions place arbitrary limits on the number of voters that a non-disqualified individual may assist in a specific election? What is the department doing in response to such limitations?

3. Has the Department received requests to monitor jurisdictions where voters who need assistance are not otherwise afforded Section 203 protections?

a. What information does the Department need for a monitoring request to be successful?

4. Please provide as much information as possible on any and all Section 208 enforcement efforts undertaken since the beginning of the Biden-Harris Administration, including pre-litigation efforts to encourage compliance with Section 208, complaints filed, and statements of interest.

5. Are there resource, regulatory, caselaw or statutory challenges the Department is facing in its efforts to enforce Section 208?

4(e)

1. How does the Department determine which jurisdictions have obligations under Section 4(e)?

2. What information does the Department need for a monitoring request to be successful regarding 4(e) compliance concerns?

3. How does the Department evaluate a jurisdiction’s compliance with Section 4(e)?

4. What ongoing outreach has the Department done with covered jurisdictions to measure their compliance?

5. How, if at all, does the Department monitor which jurisdictions have increasing populations of Puerto Rican voters?

Every American citizen has the right and must have the ability to cast a meaningful ballot, and we are so pleased to have an Administration that affirmatively works to ensure that is the case. We are grateful for your continued efforts to facilitate and defend the most fundamental aspects of our democracy, and we look forward to your answers to these questions, learning more about your process in ensuring language accessibility in elections, and continuing to work with you and your Department on behalf of a welcoming, inclusive election system.