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69 Texas Counties Failing To Provide Proper Bilingual Elections Info, ACLU of Texas Says

David Martin Davies
/
TPR News

In areas where a significant part of the population has limited English proficiency,the 1975 Voting Rights Actrequires the"clear, complete and accurate”translation of election materials. The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas says 69 counties in the Lonestar State are violating that provision with inadequate or poorly translated information for Spanish-speaking voters.

Earlier this month,the civil rights group sent lettersto the 16 counties it says are top offenders, including Webb County in South Texas.

“What we noticed is that many counties that fall under that requirement were either providing inaccurate translations, limited translations or no translations into Spanish,” said Edgar Saldivar, a senior attorney for ACLU of Texas. “We wanted to bring awareness to that in light of the upcoming election and because a significant number of Texans are Spanish speakers.”

He said some counties’ translations didn’t make sense because they were automated through tools like Google Translate, others posted links to translations that don’t work, and some didn’t have any translations.

TheWebb County elections webpagedoes not currently have any immediately visible Spanish translations, and onlysome posted documentsincluded Spanish translations. But about 36% of the population there speaks English "less than very well," according to the Census Bureau.

TPR News reached out to Webb County Elections Administrator Jose Salvador Tellez. He said he believed there should already be bilingual information, and that he hadn’t yet seen the ACLU’s letter.

“I’ll review it when it comes in, and I’ll go over it with our I.T. people,” he said. “If there’s any changes that need to be made, I guarantee you I will take care of it.”

Saldivar said this isn’t the first time that they informed officials of the violations, but it is more pressing during the pandemic.

“During a pandemic, when people aren’t able to go to local libraries or county offices to get their information, oftentimes their only available resource is a website,” he said. “So we want to make sure this information is available in the way it’s supposed to be under the Voting Rights Act.”

In the letters, the ACLU of Texas asked officials to respond or make changes byOct. 2. If they don't, the group will consider further legal action. 

Texas’ November voter registration deadline is Oct. 5. General voting information can be found in Spanish on theTexas Secretary of State’s website.

María Méndez can be reached at maría@tpr.org or on Twitter at @anxious_maria. She is a corps member of Report For America.TPR was founded by and is supported by our community. If you value our commitment to the highest standards of responsible journalism and are able to do so, please consider making your gift of support today.

Copyright 2020 Texas Public Radio

María Méndez reports for Texas Public Radio from the border city of Laredo where she covers business issues from an area that is now the nation’s top trade hub. She knows Texas well. Méndez has reported on the state’s diverse communities and tumultuous politics through internships at the Austin American-Statesman, The Texas Tribune and The Dallas Morning News. She also participated in NPR’s Next Generation Radio program while studying at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, she wrote for The Daily Texan and helped launch diversity initiatives, including two collaborative series on undocumented and first-generation college students. One of her stories for these series won an award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She spent the last year reporting for The Dallas Morning News as a summer breaking news intern and then as a fellow in the paper’s capital bureau in Austin. She is a native of Guanajuato in Central Mexico.