City agrees to settle voting rights lawsuit

Yawu Miller

The United States Justice Department has agreed to drop its voting rights suit after the Menino administration agreed to provide translators and provide election materials in Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish.

Under the agreement the city entered into with the Justice Department, federal observers will monitor polling places in Boston through 2008.

Voting rights activists said they were pleased with the outcome of the suit.

“We’re happy with the agreement,” said Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, a Chinatown-based social justice organization. “The city has adopted all of the goals the Justice Department has suggested.”

Lowe’s organization was one of several in the city that helped spark the Justice Department lawsuit after filing complaints with the agency over violations by Boston election workers.

In addition to failing to provide ballots and other materials in Spanish and Chinese, the city also failed to properly train poll workers. In the 2003 city-wide election, for instance, Spanish-speaking voters were given faulty information according to City Life/Vida Urbana Executive Director Juan Leyton.

“People who didn’t speak English were told at the polls that they had to vote for four candidates in the at-large race,” he said, noting that voters can vote for up to four candidates.

The poll workers’ instructions undermined the rights of voters to bullet vote in a race where there was only one Spanish-speaking candidate.

Leyton said the city has agreed to properly train poll workers and will change the language on ballots, adding in the language “vote for up to four candidates.”

“I think this is a major step forward,” Leyton said. “It shows willingness on behalf of the city to fix the problems. I’m optimistic that the problems will not be repeated.”

Seth Gitell, a spokesman for Mayor Thomas Menino, told the Associated Press that the agreement does not say the city did anything wrong.

“What the city objected to originally was to signing a consent decree and acknowledging wrongdoing,” he said.

Several community-based organizations in the city found numerous violations of voting procedures in the 2004 election. Students from the New Mission Charter School monitored polling stations and found violations including widespread failure to provide provisional ballots and poll workers reading ballots that voters had already marked.

Lowe also disputed the Menino administration’s contention that there was no wrongdoing.

“In 2003 we saw some of the worst voter irregularities,” she said. “We filed formal complaint letters as an organization and provided information from individual voters.”

Lowe says the city did not respond to her organization’s complaints.

She said it was the complaints that her organization sent to the Justice Department that garnered results.

“There were many individual voters who stepped forward to provide information to the Justice Department,” she said. “Without them the lawsuit would not have the strength it had.”