Is the voting ballot in your state bilingual?

It was not

No. But you can definitely request one in spanish. Not sure if other languages are also available. But it wasn’t like multiple languages were on ONE ballot.

Do I support it? I mean…sure. To an extent. There must be some cost associated with it, but spanish is a pretty common second language, and some people, even if they’ve been here long enough to naturalize, may not be strong English speakers. Some of these referenda have complex language.

But it isn’t hard to imagine this going nuts. I don’t want them providing ballots in Swahili since almost no one here speaks that. It’s a waste of money for too small a civic utility. Now, if we started to get a sizeable Swahili speaking minority, then that’s different.

I didn’t write about my state, I probably should have.

Lake County, Florida, my ballot is fully bilingual English and Spanish. Including our mail-in ballot all directions fully bilingual and the entire ballot. Even most voting centers have signage in both languages to direct people. That includes my county and surrounding counties that are not heavily Spanish speaking nor very diverse.

From what I understand, only some counties have to actually print all ballots in both languages by law, but many counties outside of the requirement do it. In the entire state Spanish written and oral must be accessible. Some counties are under law to provide translation for Seminole Indians too.

I would assume there are services for Creole for Haitians also in our southeast counties, but I’m not specifically aware of it.

In California, the available ballots are determined by county from findings of the last census.

In my county, ballots are available in Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Formosan), Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Filipino/Tagalog. In Fresno county, all those languages, plus Hmong, Cambodian/Khmer, and Punjabi.

If one needs help, just ask a precinct captain. They will get an interpreter to talk to you.

Knowing English is required for naturalized citizenship. It seems we wouldn’t need ballots in other languages.

Having ballots in a person’s native language allows them to vote in a well-informed manner. That’s what we should strive for.

@SnipSnip it’s not required for everyone to speak English to be a US citizen, there are exceptions. Even if they are required to test in English, broken English is enough to get through it.

Being able to communicate fairly well verbally is not the same as understanding a written proposition on a ballot that is worded so that yes means no. Even people who have spoken English their entire life, who were born and raised in the United States, screw up those purposely confusing propositions.

When I lived in Los Angeles, the ballot was available in something like 14 languages. In Chicago it was English, Spanish, & Polish. If more were ready I did not notice. Now I’m in Milwaukee and I have seen only English.

Multilingual in my county:
English
Spanish
Filipino
Mandarin
Cantonese
Taiwanese
Korean
Vietnamese
Filipino
Cambodian/Khmer
Gujarati
Hindi
Japanese
Korean
Nepali
Panjabi
Tamil
Telugu

If you wonder why so many, here’s a list of tech companies in my county.