Designing great language support for voter registration

We’re watching a population trend of communities that speak languages other than English moving out of urban areas and spreading out to suburbs and rural areas. This suggests that over the next few years, more jurisdictions will be required to offer materials from ballots to voter guides in languages other than English. We’re guessing that you are seeing this trend, too, wherever you are. 

Whether you are required to provide ballots and election information in languages other than English under the Voting Rights Act, or are supporting voters in your community voluntarily, getting the translations right can be a challenge.

Starting with plain language helps everyone, especially people with low English proficiency.

While people who are bilingual operate may be fine in everyday life in English, our research (and that of others) shows that for official information, being able to cross-check between languages to helps them know that they’re understanding the information correctly.

Voter registration is an invitation to engage in civic life. Having election information in language is a bridge to deeper civic engagement.

Designing for language access is a process

  • Use plain language. We know plain language helps everyone read and understand instructions and other information more easily. But simpler sentence structures and common, everyday words also makes election information easier to translate accurately.
  • Start with a glossary. Elections are full of words with special meanings. If you just dive in to translating text, you can end up with a hodge-podge that doesn’t quite make sense. Worse, the same word might be translated in different ways. Fortunately, there are glossaries in 6 languages, online, for free, from the Election Assistance Commission.
  • Make connections in the community. Machines can help you, but, well, they’re just robots that have limited vocabulary. If you use Google Translate, for example, it doesn’t know much about elections or voter guides.  So, find the people in your jurisdiction who speak the languages you want to support. Ask them for help. Create a language access committee to help you reach deeper into those communities. Invite people on the committee and in the larger community to be poll workers.
  • Test translations, and get feedback. Getting translations right can be difficult. It’s easy to make a mistake when you are not familiar with the language, yourself. We’ve seen lots of examples where the meaning of a question was flipped, the tone was harsh and off-putting when you meant to be friendly, or some combination of words makes the meaning unclear and ambiguous. Put the translations in front of people who are bilingual or have low English proficiency. Include some people who are avid voters and some who are new to the experience. Have them tell you what the text means and work on the translations until they’re easily understandable.

We know that there’s a lot going on leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. We also know that many counties and states are already starting to work on adding language support for new languages based on what they expect to happen after the 2020 Census. If you’re one of those jurisdictions, we’d love to hear from you on how you’re approaching the challenges.

Resources

This was originally published in our Civic Designing newsletter. Subscribe on Mailchimp to get election design tips delivered to your mailbox.

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