During Las Vegas' annual Dragon Boat Festival, community leaders and advocates are working to increase voter turnout among Asian residents. The Asian Community Development Council translated voting information into Chinese and distributed it at the festival, highlighting the importance of civic engagement for marginalized communities.
Vida Lin, president and founder of the Asian Community Development Council, holds a voter information booklet her group translated into Chinese during the annual Dragon Boat Festival in Las Vegas, Wednesday, June 5, 2024. LAS VEGAS — In the heart of Las Vegas’ Chinatown, on the second floor of a sprawling shopping plaza that serves as a hub for the city’s Asian community, residents gather for a celebration of the annual Dragon Boat Festival.
For Lin, these resources help increase civic engagement among one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the state and nation. That, she says, is the only way her community can gain power. “This is a way of compensating for past and ongoing discrimination that does occur in the electoral process,” says Angelo Ancheta, a California lawyer and expert on the federal language provisions.
And there are places that barely miss the federal government’s threshold to force a community to provide language assistance. Those places include Clark County, Nevada, which fell just 434 citizens short of requiring officials to provide election materials this year in Chinese. Additionally, any city or county containing even part of a Native American reservation must provide language assistance if the population and illiteracy thresholds are met.
During the same period, the number of people who speak Spanish at home grew by more than 15 million. And the number of people who speak Chinese at home increased by more than 1 million. Chinese is now the third most-spoken language in the country, behind English and Spanish. In other instances, advocacy organizations have sued to ensure communities provide the required help. In Alaska, groups have sought to enforce Section 203 in sprawling rural areas that are home mostly to Alaska Natives, many of whom still speak their native languages.on behalf of four elders whose primary language was Yup’ik, arguing officials had failed to provide the required materials or bilingual poll workers. The population in the Bethel region is 84% Indigenous.
“Since then, we have been … working really hard to provide all these materials,” says Wild Iris Anderson, the state’s language assistance compliance manager. “It really just kind of kick-started Alaska’s language accessibility.” Other officials reject the idea of providing translation help, arguing that voters in America should vote in English only.
For more than 20 years now, Iowans have been locked in a battle over whether the state can provide voter registration forms in both English and Spanish.that requires all official documents to be produced in English. The law provided an exception to protect citizens’ constitutional rights; despite that, a judge in 2008 prohibited the state from using languages other than English on voter registration forms.“There are plenty of folks who are U.S.
Growing up, Lin’s family had received support from a San Francisco Asian community center. In Las Vegas, she noticed a lack of such support. So in 2015, after Lin sold her insurance agency, she started the Asian Community Development Council. The same year, she obtained a small grant to fund voter registration drives.
In 2022, All Voting is Local, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, partnered with the Asian Community Development Council to produce a voting guide in Chinese. Translated by members of Lin’s organization, the guide provided information on statewide races and ballot initiatives, along with information about how to vote. The group distributed about 10,000 copies.
Voter Engagement Asian American Voters Nevada Politics Voting Rights Act Community Outreach
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