Puerto Ricans in New York had already successfully sued the state for discrimination, saying that it was discriminatory to print ballots in English in a city with a large Hispanic population. Spanish-speakers, Asians, American Indians and Alaskan natives. Both the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights questioned whether Hispanics needed the drastic preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In other words, that record is not compelling. We have now had bilingual ballots for twenty years, and it's time to reassess the need for them.
Bilingual ballots are unnecessary, and they are a costly burden.
The Voting Rights Act assumes that low turnout is caused by barriers to voting, so let's look a couple of districts with low voter turnout. California's 33rd District, which is 79 percent Hispanic, has a voting-age population of 384,472 persons. But in 1994 it only had 96,404 registered voters, about a quarter of the voting-age population. New York's 12th District, which is 54 percent Hispanic, has a voting-age population of 416,223 persons. But in 1994 only 182,964 voters were registered there.