Bilingual youth voters: Explorative interviews
Bilingual youth voters: Explorative interviews
In a series of moderated interviews, we set out to hear stories from bilingual citizens about their experiences to discover pain points and barriers to accessing voter registration information, civic engagement, and the next steps in the voting process.
Bilingual youth voters: Explorative interviews
Download reportKey findings
In our interviews, the following themes stood out:
Family is more influential than friends
Supportive, dutiful family members drive voting activity for new voters in the family. Encouraging vote activity among distanced friend groups is less effective.
Language builds trust with LEP voters
Bilingual youth often act as a translator and, in some cases, as a “vote information expert” for LEP family members.
A lot of burden is placed on a translator with limited civics or voter vocabulary, including LEP voters. This requires translated materials to be accessible to both bilingual & LEP voters.
Voter information discourse should be bilingual
Bilingual & LEP voters learn how to vote from different social media, news, and information sources. Relying solely on printed materials from the elections office is not enough to engage voters.
About the research
Center for Civic Design’s 2022 Civic Design Fellow Robert Pérez led a research project to better understand civic engagement attitudes among bilingual youth in San Mateo County, California, with support from Fernando Sánchez.
Related resources
Visit our page on language access to find more resources about providing information about voting and elections in languages other than English.
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