Reuters North American News Service, January 10th, 2008
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Asian American voters fear the
discrimination some faced at polling stations in 2006 could
resurface as they cast ballots in November's presidential
election, a civil rights group said Thursday.
Laws that enable Asian Americans from countries including
China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to get language and
other kinds of assistance with voting were often flouted at the
2006 mid-term congressional elections, according to the Asian
American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The group cited examples of Asian Americans being asked to
provide more identification than other citizens, in
contravention of federal law. Those not on voter rolls but
still eligible to vote were often not given provisional ballots
to complete, it said in a report.
Under the landmark Voting Rights Act and a subsequent act,
election officials in districts with more than 10,000
registered Asian Americans, or ones where their voting
population exceeds 5 percent of a district's total, are
mandated to provide certain help.
The provisions also apply in areas where there are low
levels of literacy and people speak an Asian language, and
mandate help such as translators and translated ballots and
registration forms.
"Our major concern is that there is going to be a large
number of newly registered Asian voters (in 2008) and many of
the problems we have observed in 2006 will not have been
fixed," said Margaret Fung, executive director of the fund.
She said that on polling day in 2006 there were many
examples of "racist and intimidatory" remarks to Asian
Americans such as: "'How come you don't speak English?', 'Why
don't you go back to your home country?' and 'You're turning
this country into a dump."'
The group said it registered 200 complaints during
monitoring of 172 polling sites and a multilingual survey of
over 4,700 Asian American voters in nine states.
The Asian American community is predominantly immigrant and
some 670,000 are covered under the provisions of the Voting
Rights Act. The majority live in Los Angeles or elsewhere in
California. The next largest group lives in New York, followed
by Hawaii, Houston and Chicago, Fung said.
Mandarin or other Chinese dialects are the largest language
group, Fung said.
Exit polls taken in nine states in 2006 showed that four
out of five Asian Americans voted for the Democratic Party but
Fung said she did not know if the problems some encountered
were an attempt to disenfranchise them for political reasons.
"Asian Americans, even though they are citizens, are still
perceived as foreigners. As part of an anti-immigrant sentiment
that seems to be on the rise there is hostility and some sense
that these people are newcomers and don't belong," she said.
The economy and jobs were the most important issues for
Asian Americans, followed by health care, the war in Iraq and
education, she said, citing a survey. Many Asian Americans were
also concerned about long waits to process paperwork needed to
bring family members to the United States, she said.
(Editing by David Wiessler)
