Sociolinguistic Artifacts

Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act (enacted in 1975) requires some districts to provide ballots in multiple languages, but only certain languages. The law "relies on data about race and ethnicity as a "proxy" to identify the protected language groups." That means since the Census Bureau officially categorizes Middle Eastern or Northern African speakers of Arabic as white, and since Haitian Creole is considered an Indo-European language, neither language is protected under this law. The intention of the law was to counteract low voting participation in communities for which "there is a historical record of evidence showing they've faced voting and educational discrimination." But those in these federally protected language minority groups are not the only communities who struggle to vote because they cannot access the code in which ballots are written. [Published on 06-26-2022]