Since today is Election Day, we thought we'd take this opportunity to highlight an issue that has really been irking us.
In June of this year, A.3225 / S.4731 passed the New York State Assembly and was presented to the New York State Senate's Rules Committee.
The bill -- which seeks to amend the State's Election Law to provide Russian language voting materials -- strikes us yet another example of our political leaders pandering to a voting bloc at taxpayers' expense.
According to the bill memo , there are some "320,000 residents of the New York Metropolitan area who were born in Rusia and other former Soviet Union territories ... [T]here are between 1 and 1.5 million Russian-speaking people living there."*
Although they reportedly comprise 20% of some Assembly districts, Russian-speaking voters are allegedly being "shut out of the voting process." The bill seeks to end that disenfranchisement by furnishing voting materials (including ballots) in Russian as well as in English.
The bill's text provides as follows:
WHENEVER A BOARD OF ELECTIONS IN A CITY OF OVER ONE MILLION PROVIDES ANY REGISTRATION OR VOTING NOTICES, FORMS, INSTRUCTIONS, ASSISTANCE, OR OTHER MATERIALS OR INFORMATION RELATING TO THE ELECTORAL PROCESS, INCLUDING BALLOTS, IT SHALL PROVIDE THEM IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE AS WELL AS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
As of October 27, 2007, the New York City Board of Elections has yet to meet with the New York City Law Department and/or the New York City Office of State Legislative Affairs to review the impact this proposed legislation would have. While the City and State spin their wheels examining options and alternatives -- all on our dime -- we were wondering if it was too much to ask that voters have at least SOME facility with the mother tongue? (After all, last time I checked, English is still our country's official language, no?)
Do svidanja!
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*This quote just doesn't make sense. Is it 320,000 or 1.5 million people? And, of those numbers how many are eligible to vote? Surprisingly, the Memo cites a March 2004 "MSNBC article" as the source of the data upon which our Legislators have relied. That strikes us as bizarre. What happened to the use of primary source materials, like census data?