Georgia voters have more language access with multilingual ballots in this year's election

November 1st, 2024

Georgia voters will be asked a series of yes-no questions on Election Day on Tuesday covering a wide range of issues. — In this March 1, 2016 file photo, poll worker Delores Peterson, left, hands a sticker to a voter after they casted their ballot in Georgia's primary election at a polling site in Atlanta. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Voters in three Georgia counties will have access to multilingual election materials this presidential election.

Gwinnett County is legally required to translate ballots and other materials into Spanish. DeKalb County and Athens-Clarke County are proactively translating materials.

“Language disenfranchisement is a factor in voting rights,” said Anar Parikh, a senior policy analyst for Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta.

Section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act mandates all information that is provided in English must be translated in voting jurisdictions with more than 5% or 10,000 citizens of voting age who are more proficient in a language other than English.

Gwinnett County was the first in Georgia to provide ballots in another language. In 2016, the U.S. Census determined the county met the threshold for Spanish-speaking voters and offered Spanish ballots and all materials translated, plus bilingual poll workers. Census data shows in 2023, 28% of all citizens in the county spoke a language other than English at home.

Since then, the county has also translated sample ballots and other election materials into Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese even though they do not legally have to.

“If we think about what the Voting Rights Act is for, it was put in place to protect voters who experience disenfranchisement,” Parikh said. “Providing translated language materials and making sure there are multilingual poll workers are all ways to make voting accessible to as many people as possible.”

DeKalb County does not have multilingual ballots, but translates election materials into Spanish, Korean and Ahmaric. Census data shows in 2023, 12% of all citizens in DeKalb spoke a language other than English at home.

Athens-Clarke County is offering ballots in Spanish for the first time this election, even though the county does not legally have to. Census data found 8% of all citizens in the county speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish speakers making up half that population.

“The federal threshold for providing translated materials is really high, almost prohibitively so,” Parikh said. “Just because a county does not meet those numbers does not mean there is not a demand.”