Speak voters’ languages – Brooklyn pol
Councilman Mark Treyger wants the city to provide more interpreters speaking more languages at poll sites on election days — and to actually let them in the door.
Treyger will introduce legislation Wednesday to require the city Voter Assistance Advisory Committee to set up a program to provide interpreters speaking the 10 most-spoken tongues at poll sites where they are needed — a measure he hopes will end the Board of Elections practice of treating the interpreters as electioneers and keeping them 100 feet from the entrance to a voting location.
“What they did to the interpreters this past election was really inhumane and disgusting,” Treyger (D-Brooklyn) told the Daily News. “They forced them to stay 100 feet away from the poll sites in this freezing cold rain because they had this twisted definition of what electioneering is. Helping people find out if they’re in the right place . . . is not electioneering.”
Treyger became worried about language access at the polls years ago when he was called to a poll site in Bensonhurst because a voter who spoke Russian was struggling to communicate with a poll worker about whether he was at the right site. After a poll worker who spoke Russian tried to help, the poll site’s coordinator rebuked the worker — insisting they could only speak the languages allowed by the Board of Elections: Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Bengali.
Close to 40% of New Yorkers are foreign-born and close to half of Brooklynites speak another language at home, Treyger notes. Treyger spearheaded a Council effort to create a pilot program for interpreters speaking Russian and Haitian Creole, and the mayor’s office recently expanded that program to include the 10 mostspoken languages in the city.
But the Board of Elections resisted, Treyger said, arguing there wasn’t enough money for the program, the state hasn’t mandated it, and the federal Voting Rights Act requires it to provide interpreters in specific languages only if 5% of a county’s voters speak it.