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August 4, 2005

Jeremy Schwab

After the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit last week charging the city of Boston with violating the voting rights of people with limited English skills, Mayor Thomas Menino shot back, “I can’t wait to fight this in court.”

Menino’s comment, reported Tuesday in the Boston Globe, underscored the defensive attitude his administration has taken in the face of the lawsuit, which comes just a few months before November’s mayoral election.

Most previous voting rights cases alleging mistreatment of voters with limited English skills have been settled by consent decrees, according to a spokesman for the Justice Department.

When asked why the administration chose to fight the suit, a spokesman for Menino said the suit does not specify what incidents of voting rights violations actually occurred.

“If you look at the nine page complaint, there is a call for a remedy with no specifics on how the city is supposed to remedy the situation,” said the spokesman, Seth Gitell.

However, when asked whether Menino would consider settling the dispute out of court if specifics are given, Gitell would not give a definitive answer.

“I’m not going to speculate,” he said.

Gitell said the city has made “significant strides” in providing voting access. He noted that at a recent special election in Dorchester materials were translated not just into Spanish as required by law, but into six other languages as well.

The lawsuit seeks federal oversight of city elections until 2007, and alleges that the city’s “elections standards, practices and procedures” negatively affected limited English proficient Latino and Asian American voters.

Latino and Asian American voters were treated with hostility; denied the right to be assisted by a person of their choice; their ballot choices were improperly influenced, coerced or ignored by poll workers; translators were not made available to them and poll workers refused or failed to provide provisional ballots to them, according to a Justice Department press release.

The suit also alleges that despite repeated warnings from the Justice Department, the city failed to place Spanish-speaking personnel at most polling places where they were needed, in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

MassVOTE, Viet-AID and the Chinese Progressive Association reportedly turned over records to the Justice Department to help in the investigation.

Incidents of alleged voting rights abuses have occurred in Boston in recent years. In the 2003 preliminary city elections, the election department allegedly understaffed polls, allowed campaign workers to come within 150 feet of polling stations and did not provide adequate privacy to voters casting their ballots, according to a letter to then-Election Commissioner Nancy Lo from the secretary of state’s office.

In the general elections that year, voters in Chinatown, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester who attempted to bullet vote — to voter for only one candidate instead of four — were reportedly told they had to vote for four at-large city council candidates.

MassVOTE Director Atiya Dangleben attributed the problems in 2003 to a lack of properly trained poll workers.

“They were not well trained in many instances,” she said. “We didn’t find poll workers had any ill will or anything like that. They just didn’t know.”

Dangleben said that since Election Commissioner Geraldine Cuddyer took over for her predecessor Nancy Lo last year, the election department has been more cooperative in working with activists such as MassVOTE to remedy complaints.

Some elected officials of color questioned the city’s decision to fight the lawsuit.

“I don’t understand why he is resisting moving ahead with the remedies,” said City Councilor Chuck Turner. “I think they ought to respond and take care of those issues rather than spending city money to fight what seemed to be legitimate requests.”

Councilor Felix Arroyo, the council’s only Latino, said complaints of discrimination should be taken seriously.

“Any complaints from citizens either in a legal or informal fashion regarding their rights to participate democratically in our elections should be taken quite seriously,” he said. “That is the core of citizenship. That is the core of the power that each individual in our community should have.”

 

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