Last year the city of Boston began transliterating candidates’ names on local ballots, and now the city council is petitioning for names on state and federal ballots to be written in Chinese characters, also.
“It’s just a very basic right,” said Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, which is pushing the vote. “Why wouldn’t you want to make it possible for citizens to vote?”
The push for bilingual ballots rose from concerns that voters could not understand ballots and that some poll workers in Chinatown were telling voters which candidate to choose.
Secretary of State William F. Gavin, who supported a 2005 initiative to provide voting ballots in Chinese and Vietnamese, is opposed to transliterating names.
While Galvin supports bilingual ballots and the state has provided them in Boston for state and federal elections, he opposes using Chinese characters for candidates’ names. He said the translations do not always reflect the person’s name and at worse could have a negative connotation.
As examples, Galvin said, Mitt Romney’s name could have been confused in Chinese characters with “sticky rice” on the ballot; Mayor Thomas M. Menino could be “imbecile.”
Yesterday, Galvin said he opposed the council’s petition. “It isn’t out of belligerence that we’re saying no we won’t do it,” he said. “It adds uncertainty and potential disputes into the process.”
Galvin said the 2005 agreement did not require names in Chinese, and a federal court supported his contention.
Elderly Chinese-Americans favor ballots with transliterated names.
“With the ballot translated, your chance of making a mistake is really small,” said Tse Ngar Cho, an 83-year-old Chinatown resident whose whole world is in Chinese, from the newspapers he reads to the basketball games he watches. “You know what candidate you’re voting for.”
Jian Hua Tang, a 59-year-old Chinese schoolteacher, said she never would have confused Romney’s name with “sticky rice,” like Galvin suggested last year. “That’s like saying if your last name is Green, I should confuse you as a green person,” she said.
I support translated ballots as the language of propositions is complicated and difficult to understand even for educated native speakers, but transliterating names? Every single naturalized citizen is required to pass a test of basic English by reading or writing sentences like “Only Congress can declare war” and “We are very smart to learn this.” Based on my own communications with some older naturalized citizens, I suspect that some examiners are lenient in passing applicants, which is understandable since the test is not exactly a valid measure of English proficiency. Even if the names were transliterated into Chinese, uninformed voters could still be influenced by local poll workers. Is it too much to ask those granted the privilege of naturalized citizenship to learn at least the names of the candidates they vote for?
10 Comments
Got a nutty little suggestion for the “Chinese Progressive Association” — why not print up some freakin flyers with name/character translations and hand em out?
If they don’t even know the English names of the people they are voting for, how are they going to make an informed decision on who to vote for?
This is a bunch of retarded Chinese nationalism.
I’d like to see where it goes. Hopefully your government isn’t truly as stupid as they act.
This idea is flawed in principle.
English — only — should be used. Ballot lists, written in different languages — could easily be kept at voting stations so that if someone wanted to see the names in another language, they could simply ask for the list, thus solving that problem. Basically, this is just an issue of aiding your constituents in the most effective manner that does not add to the bureaucracy and confusion.
Would it be a goo moment to link this post with the one about integration of Asian minorities in the US?
Y’know, I read about stuff like this and I wonder if the measure proposed by the folks at Boston isn’t actually being put forth by the anti-immigration sector as an agitator, because it’s JUST THAT STUPID. If these voters can’t understand the English speeches that the candidates make (which seem more and more dumbed down as the years go by), they shouldn’t be voting.
In Hong Kong permanent residents and companies can vote in LegCo elections — which means that foreign owners of some HK based companies and foreign people who’ve been 7+ years and qualified for the permanent ID card can vote for the equivalent of general elections. I have seen quite a bit of campaigning, including from the government to entice eligible people to register. Apparently HK voters are not very motivated… Explains probably why they even go the extra mile and scrape the bottom of the barrel by allowing companies to vote, too…
Anyway, while the government’s efforts are bilingual — albeit a little on the HongKonglish side of things — campaigning is done solely [and loudly!] in Cantonese, and I wonder how people who’ve been here 10 or 20 years and still don’t speak enough Cantonese to order 飮茶 can really make an informed decision on who to vote for. My guess would be they either vote like their woman, or they don’t bother at all…
“If they don’t even know the English names of the people they are voting for, how are they going to make an informed decision on who to vote for?”
Bingo. If they honestly wanted to make it simpler for people who can’t read, they would be demanding that pictures of the candidates be put on the ballot.
Disaster:
http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/~al.....icians.pdf
note that Dim-o-crat politicians all seem to like the idea of people who don’t understand English voting in US elections…
Not Democrats or Republicans… Just Idiotarians…
Note that George and Jeb Bush pandered notoriously to the Latino vote.