For Richmond’s Laotian and Mien population, language presents a barrier to voting
on November 1, 2024
Seuy Karnsouvong remembers going to the fire station by Crescent Park in Richmond with her late husband, Boonthong, to vote. Since she wasn’t familiar with English like he was, he would walk her through filling out her ballot.
That was decades ago, but Karnsouvong still needs help dissecting the complicated language used in measures and other parts of the ballot. She isn’t alone in needing assistance with voting.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Richmond has 1,667 Laotian and 182 Mien residents. Many of these residents struggle with the complex language in their Lao-translated ballots, which prevents them from fully engaging in elections, said Sandy Saeteurn, local political coordinator at Asian Pacific Environmental Network. Some face additional barriers because they speak minority Laotian dialects such as Mien and Khmu, and others do not read or write in their own language.
Karnsouvong and her late husband were some of the first from their community to join APEN after the 1999 Chevron explosion. The environmental justice organization was actively engaging the Laotian community at the time.
APEN has built a system of civic education and translation for monolingual Laotian, Mien, and Khmu communities in Richmond.
During an election year, APEN and other organizations work with immigrant and refugee communities by conducting ballot meetings with their members. This involves voter education and discussions around civic engagement that are translated spontaneously into Lao, Mien and Khmu.
“We need to have interpreters who can really talk it through in detail with the members,” said Megan Zapanta, APEN’s Richmond organizing director.
California’s Elections Code does provide a Lao-translated ballot guide to help those who read and write in that language. However, another group of voters is still being overlooked, Saeteurn said. Laotian, Mien and Khmu voters who do not read or write.
“I don’t think that as a system or society as a whole that we have been really targeting how to create more accessibility for monolingual folks who don’t read or write,” she said.
For those they can’t reach in person, APEN finds creative ways to educate by creating explanatory videos in their languages.
“They can’t understand in terms of reading and writing, but if we create it in language videos and they watch it, they can hear it and see it and they can understand it,” Saeteurn said.
Both the federal Voting Rights Act and the California Elections Code use census data collected every five years to determine which language minority groups receive translated election materials and ballot guides.
The Voting Rights Act mandates translation if a single language group in a jurisdiction is more than 5% of all voting-age citizens and has an illiteracy rate above the national average. Yet these policies overlook many people like Karnsouvong who rely on spoken translation.
California’s Elections Code requires counties to provide translated ballot guides when at least 3% of voting-age residents in an area speak a minority language and need help voting in English.
For Contra Costa County, translated ballots are available for Chinese, Taiwanese and Hispanic populations. The translated ballot guides required by the California Elections Code are Filipino, Hindi, Korean, Laotian, Nepali, Panjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Vietnamese.
As APEN’s Laotian and Khmu interpreter, Manh Phongboupha knows the challenges well. He reviews small phrases repeatedly to understand what he’s translating and to ensure he can simplify it for monolingual voters, he said.
“From being able to read, being able to get there to vote in person or drop it off, there’s just a lot of obstacles that our community has to deal with,” Saeteurn said.
Richmond voters consider conflicting ballot measures that would change how local leaders are elected.
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We’re all sympathetic to our immigrant neighbors and the difficulties in acclimating to their new culture.
At what point, though, should they be incentivized to truly acclimate? After residing here for multiple decades, for instance, at what point should they be expected to be conversant in the language of their adopted home?
It’s a tough one.
Quite frankly, this was actually one–and certainly not the main one–of the reasons why some communities used to require a voter pass a literacy test before being allowed to vote. If they can’t understand what they’re reading on the ballot, how are they supposed to know the issues and the candidates before voting?
As we read here, trusted advisors were leading them towards voting a specific way. In a less than perfect world–the less than perfect world most of us live in–it would be all too easy for an unscrupulous person in a community to ‘help’ neighbors all the while coopting their votes–thus turning his/her vote into MANY votes.
We used to see swarms of immigrants showing up to school board meetings pleading that the adult school not be closed because they depended on their ESL classes to help them to help their own children with their homework. That was a pretty good incentive.
I would hope that being able to take full advantage of their voting franchise would also be an incentive. Each and every one of us–as citizens–is entitled to vote but with that right comes the responsibility to actually know and understand about the issues and the candidates.
I would like to know more about this “explosion” at the Chevron refinery in 1999. I’m pretty well steeped about any fires and releases at this refinery–at least going back to 1970–but I can’t recall such an “explosion” as referenced here.
We have a lot of people who like to conflate ‘fires’ with ‘explosions’ because “explosion” sounds a lot sexier when trying to incite the masses.
Among the good they do for our community, they also do things that would make us cringe but do we really need to make things up to stir up the masses?
Surely the Richmond Confidential is not relying on the bogus article posted on Wikipedia that was posted by someone who cannot cite references to back up the many claims stated in the article. [I was actually there for some of the ‘incidents’ and can vouch for the many inaccuracies.] Surely the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism explains the perils associated with using Wikipedia as a source.
Your own school used to have me lecture your students on how to report on industrial accidents. I’ve been used as an expert witness in court cases and depositions because of my lengthy and extensive history in this field.
Also, many of the cited sources are of dubious validity.
As an example of using words to excite the masses that are not completely accurate, we have many people in the Richmond/Berkeley/Oakland community that still claim that on August 6, 2012 when a process pipe in the LSFO unit [a unit I helped build back in 1974-1976] leaked from a corroded section of the pipe, these people are fond of recalling the multiple explosions. If you read the Chemical Safety Board’s report on the incident, the word ‘explosion’ is only used twice and it refers to explosions at refineries in the Gulf States and another in New Jersey. Don’t you think that if there actually was an explosion associated with this fire that it would have been mentioned? [There was a pick up truck and a small fire truck parked close to the fire that became engulfed in flames resulting in fuel tanks exploding but this was not an explosion in the actual LSFO unit.]
Mr. Gosney, the story relied on media reports at the time. Those reports mention a blown valve stem and describe an explosion.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Chevron-Oil-Refinery-Blast-Rocks-Richmond-2939897.php
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2012/08/09/you-thought-mondays-chevron-fire-was-bad-look-back-to-the-90s/
(Christine Schiavo, Richmond Confidential editor)