In Garfield County, you can register to vote in Spanish, and you can practice voting in Spanish. You can’t, however, vote in Spanish.
Of the 64 counties in Colorado, only three provide bilingual ballots.
Irma, who didn't want to use her last name, first crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1980s. Her daughters are U.S. citizens, her granddaughters are U.S. citizens, and, as of 2012, she is a U.S. citizen. She voted for the first time several days ago. She chose a president, a senator, etc., but when she got to the local ballot measures, she was confused.
"I didn’t put nothing, because I didn’t know about what they were talking," she said.
She didn’t want to vote on something she didn’t understand, so she left those questions blank and submitted her ballot. Now, there are resources Irma could have used. According to Jean Albrico, the Garfield County clerk and recorder, "because we know we have a large Hispanic population in Garfield County, we try to provide as much information as we can in both languages."
If Irma had gone to the polls, she could have brought anyone along to help her. She voted by mail, however, and said she would have benefited from a Spanish ballot.
The county does allocate resources to engage Spanish-speaking voters, but it doesn’t provide a Spanish ballot because it’s not required. The three counties in Colorado that provide bilingual ballots do so because the federal government makes them.
Melissa Hart, a professor of constitutional law at University of Colorado Boulder, explained how English-only ballots can be discriminatory. The Department of Justice -- operating under the Voting Rights Act -- tries to prevent this.
According to Hart, the question becomes, "Is the right to vote being effectively denied by not having the ballots in Spanish, or Chinese, or whatever the language minority is?”
The Department of Justice works with census data and finds places where there are more than 10,000 citizens, or more than 5 percent of voting age citizens who all speak one language other than English, and don’t speak English that well.
Those are what’s called “covered jurisdictions.” Even though Garfield county is 28 percent Hispanic, it doesn’t meet the federal threshold.
Still, there are people like Irma who submitted a half-complete ballot.
Professor Hart doesn't think it's fair. "I think it should be possible to get a ballot in the language you’re most comfortable reading and writing in," she said.
Irma is determined to become more comfortable reading and writing in English. That’s why she’s enrolled in her class at CMC, which meets every Tuesday and Thursday from 9 to 11 a.m. Maybe, in the next election, she’ll be able to fill her whole ballot out.
"It’s a right I have now. I’m a citizen. I’m part of this country, too," she said.
