Changes improve elections for Yup’iks

MARY LOCHNER

October 23, 2008 at 11:30AM AKST

Yupik-speaking voters saw improved outreach efforts by the Alaska Division of Elections to welcome them to the voting process and explain how they could vote in the Aug. 26 primaries, and intentions are to continue those efforts for Nov. 4 elections.

Both sides in a suit against the state to provide adequate voting assistance to Yup’ik-speaking voters, as required under the Federal Voting Rights Act, noted improvements during state primaries.

The city of Bethel is also a defendant in the suit. But the state was specifically ordered in the suit by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess to do a number of things to help Yup’ik-speakers vote in the primaries. The list of mandates included providing a standard Yup’ik-language sample ballot and training bilingual poll workers in Yup’ik-speaking areas.

The results of those efforts are in.

The state was required to submit a report on how well it was following the requirements of the court order both before and after the primaries. The post-primaries report was turned in to the courts Sept. 26. As of this writing, there has not been any response from the courts on the state’s findings.

National American Rights Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union are representing the suit’s plaintiffs, which are four Yup’ik elders and four Yup’ik village councils. The two organizations have been collecting information for their own report following the primaries.

The two sides agree increased outreach to Yup’ik-speaking voters improved accessibility. Most of the affected areas lie in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and Bristol Bay areas of Western Alaska.

Shelly Growden, election systems manager for the Alaska Division of Elections, said those efforts are ongoing and still having an affect. She said voter registration in the Bethel census area increased by 160 voters between September and the Oct. 4 deadline for general elections Nov. 4.

“I truly believe some of the increase in voter registration can be attributed to the extra work we’ve done with outreach,” Growden said.

A resolution passed at the Oct. 7-9 annual convention for the Association of Village Council Presidents thanking the plaintiffs in the Yup’ik language voting suit for “standing up and fighting for the right to vote for all of us, and especially those whose first language is Yup’ik,” underscored the importance of recent efforts to get Yup’ik language assistance at the polls.

“Some of our people, and especially our elders, do not understand what they are voting for and many of them are afraid to vote because they fear their vote may hurt their own people,” the resolution states.

The voting system’s most significant improvement has been outreach through Yup’ik language radio and television ads, and other means, said NARF attorney Natalie Landreth. But she said that doesn’t mean the state did everything it’s supposed to during the primaries.

Landreth said that, according to the state’s own report, it fell short of the mandate to provide bilingual poll worker training. More than half of the poll workers didn’t receive training, she said.

The state presents a different picture. Growden said the state provided extra training for bilingual poll workers and instituted use of a language-assistance log statewide to better track language-assisted voting.

“The information we received in primaries from logs show all the communities that had voters that need Alaska Native language assistance had bilingual election workers,” Growden said. “We didn’t have a single voter that needed Alaska Native language assistance that couldn’t get it.”

She also noted the state’s Yup’ik bilingual assistance coordinator, Dorie Wassilie, was available via a toll-free number to respond to any hitches in Yup’ik-language assistance on election day. Wassilie helped a number of bilingual poll workers with questions, and was able to field and answer questions all in Yup’ik, she said.

Disagreement also remains about the adequacy of the standard Yup’ik ballot used in the primaries.

Growden said the only complaints the Alaska Division of Elections heard about the translation were regarding the ballot measures. She chalked that up to wording that was already difficult to understand even in the English version, and that trying to clarify them would be out of bounds for the division.

But Landreth said NARF and the ACLU have heard from bilingual Yup’ik poll workers who said the translation was so bad they had to re-translate the whole thing. Others said they were told not to bring the sample ballot to the polls because it was “secret,” she said. And, one expert witness who is a fluent Yup’ik speaker and has taught the language for 35 years has identified problems with the translated ballot, she said.

Perhaps the greatest disparity between the state and plaintiffs’ version of how the primaries went comes down to voters’ access to the Yup’ik ballot. Division of Elections officials have said they couldn’t allow voters to see it for themselves without getting pre-clearance from the Department of Justice, because written assistance was not mandated by federal court order. At the primaries, Yup’ik-speaking voters could hear the ballot read aloud in Yup’ik, but were not allowed to read it for themselves.

“The order does not say the sample ballot is for poll workers’ eyes only,” Landreth said. “But if (the state) felt constrained, they could have jointly moved to amend the court order.”

She said there were other materials the state promised but didn’t provide, such as audio CDs of Yup’ik translations. The state has contended that those, too, are materials that need pre-clearance from the Department of Justice before they can be used.

Growden said the same things that were in place for the primaries will be available for the general election Nov. 4, and that the state is looking at doing some of the things that were ordered by the federal court in the case of Yup’ik speaking voters for voters who speak other Alaska Native languages with enough speakers within their precincts to be covered by the Federal Voting Rights Act. Within each precinct, there must be 5 percent or more speakers to trigger language assistance requirements in Alaska.

Growden said the Alaska Division of Elections will have an outreach booth at the Alaska Federation of Natives annual convention in Anchorage Oct. 23 through 25.

Mary Lochner can be reached at 907-348-2438, or 800-770-9830, ext. 438.