Arcadia, California, holds an all-mail ballot for city office this month. The ballots are printed in several languages. The ballot is supposed to tell voters to vote for up to two candidates for city council. But the Mandarin directions on the ballot, intended to help voters who read Mandarin easier than English, says to vote for up to three candidates. The city will send a postcard to all voters, warning them of the error. See this story. Thanks to ElectionUpdates for the link.
Here is the voter’s pamphlet and (corrected) sample ballot for Arcadia.
http://www.ci.arcadia.ca.us/docs/102981532012arcadia0410_final.pdf
Hopefully they get book postal rates. Not only do they have to do everything in four languages (English, Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese), but they have to included an explanation of why they do so, along with all the people that you might contact to complain about it.
The ballot itself is extremely busy. If the goal is to help those who are barely literate in English, then it probably not too helpful. I wonder whether the Brennan Center has studied this.
The Vietnamese translation (according to Google) of “Vote for no more than two” is “Vote for no more than two persons”. So maybe in Vietnamese, a word-for-word translation could read as “don’t vote for number two” or “don’t vote for Thieu” or maybe you just use different forms of numbers depending on what you are counting.
The Chinese version back-translates as “Up to the election two”. “up to two” may have a slightly different connotation than “not more than two”. In the case of an election, you may want to convey that abstention (complete or partial) is OK, but that full participation is preferred.
Maybe the person who did the Chinese translation didn’t understand the English version. It could be hard to actually check. Someone who was familiar with election procedures, might carelessly read the Chinese version knowing what it is supposed to say, and not reading what it actually says.
This is like the SOS not reading what the application for the Top 2 ballot actually says, because she thought it was saying something else.
California Elections Code (13210) specifies either “Vote for One” or “Vote for No More Than Two”. It would be interesting whether it used to be “Vote for No More than One” and that confused voters who may not recognize zero and one as being numbers, but “Vote for One” is an imperative to not abstain.
In Texas, the language is “Vote for none, one, two, …, or maximum” and is only used when some offices are not single-member.
So in Arcadia, Texas it would have read “Vote for none, one, or two” and might have been more likely to get translated correctly.