In recent months, the New Hampshire Secretary of State has asked members of the public to use official resources for the utmost reliable recommendation on how to vote, especially since the state’s electoral procedure has been adapted to COVID-19.
“As he prepares to vote this year, that the state and election officials are his reliable resources of election data,” tweeted the Secretary of State’s office. “Get ready and make sure you get accurate data and answers to your questions. “
But in New Hampshire, the Secretary of State only provides official election data in English, and left-wing advocates such as Eva Castillo, director of the New Hampshire Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees, must take over, translating recommendations or even accompanying the less-speaking electorate. English to the polls.
“It is our duty to do the task of the Secretary of State, to tell them the truth, ” said Castillo. “We have a wonderful network of other people running in the community, but if we don’t do it ourselves, they probably won’t even vote.
Castillo and other members of Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig’s Multicultural Advisory Council wrote to Secretary of State Bill Gardner this week asking her to factor COVID-19’s new voting procedures in Spanish, Nepali, French and other languages spoken through the developing immigrant from New York. Hampshire and refugee communities.
Some local polling stations, specifically in Nashua, and outdoor political teams are already offering translated resources for voters. NHPR will also offer spanish voting resources.
But most official voting rules in New Hampshire are centrally issued through the secretary of state’s office. Subsequent voting requests, voter registration bureaucracy and official documents are all in English.
The council also asked Gardner to allow the electorate to deliver their absentee ballots in delivery mailboxes outside the general hours of the city corridor, as well as at the polls on polling day. ballots are sent back through an entry box, provided that the deposit box is “directed through a well-trained election official. “Voters can also personally deliver their absentee ballots at polling stations on voting day according to existing guidelines.
“We perceive that holding fair elections in the midst of a pandemic is incredibly complicated and we appreciate the steps he is already taking in this regard,” the council wrote to Gardner. “We are confident that our recommendations will be valid for the next election is fair to all and inspires citizens to exercise their right to vote. “
The Secretary of State did not respond to NHPR’s request for comments on the considerations raised in Friday afternoon’s letter. In the past, however, state election officials have pointed to federal benchmarks that require states to offer voters in languages other than English.
“When a network reaches a safe threshold in terms of the electorate’s population that does not speak English or whose English is the language of the moment, the state is guilty of printing ballots for those communities,” Undersecretary of State Dave Scanlan told NHPR in 2018. At the time, Scanlan said his workplace was not aware of any disorder similar to the lack of voting fabrics in other languages.
But Castillo said state officials are not proactive enough in this factor and that language barriers are really a challenge for many New Hampshire citizens. She said the state deserves to touch defenders like her to make sure electorates from many other backgrounds have what they want. participate in the New Hampshire elections and find the most productive way to interact with the electorate beyond publishing translated documents on a government website.
“Your user here, a naturalized citizen, has no idea who the secretary of state is,” he says.
These articles are shared through members of The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, colaborativenh. org.