On August 21, the California Assembly passed SB 1233, would requires circulators of initiative, referendum, and recall petitions to have in their possession while they are working copies of their petitions in the same languages (other than English) that are sometimes printed on ballots. In Los Angeles County, that will mean eight sets of petitions. See this story. Proponents of these types of petition would also be required to tell the Secretary of State which counties they will be working in, before starting to circulate the petition.
The bill had passed the State Senate on May 29, but it has been amended since then, and must return to the Senate.
Arguably, this is a requirement of the VRA.
28 CFR Part 55.1(b) requires:
(1) That materials and assistance should be provided in a way designed to allow members of applicable language minority groups to be effectively informed of and participate effectively in voting-connected activities; and
(2) That an affected jurisdiction should take all reasonable steps to achieve that goal.
So the issues are to what extent is a solicitor acting as an agent of the State; and whether the proposed law is a reasonable step.
The part about requiring the State to provide the translations is reasonable. There could be legal issues if different presentations of a ballot issue were voted on in different counties.
Since all signatures count the same, it is reasonable that all signers be equally well informed about what they are signing. So if a circulator is soliciting in a particular language, it is reasonable to present the signer with the appropriate version.
If you wanted to make this enforceable, it would require an indication on the petition as to what language was used in the solicitation.
But requiring a stack of language versions is just busywork, and the language as proposed in Section 9023 is ambiguous. It requires the translated version be made available to each person that is solicited in that language. But it would not appear that the other language versions be made “available” to anyone, but just stapled to the form.
If someone wanted a copy of another language version, they could just go to county election officials. If the proponent thought it advantageous to have the other language versions available, they would make them available, and they would use circulators who could communicate in the other languages.
The way counties are handled does not make sense. California is required by the VRA to provide election materials in certain languages in certain counties. The VRA does not preclude California from providing those materials to voters in other counties. While petitions are specific to the county of the signer, they don’t have to be signed in that county. If a Vietnamese speaker who lives in Riverside County is visiting Orange County, it doesn’t make sense that a Vietnamese-speaking solicitor could not have him sign the Riverside petition.
If I were doing it, any statewide initiative would get translated into all languages used in the state. The solicitors could use any language they and the signer mutually understand. If the solicitor wants to use Korean, then he would make sure there was a Korean version of the initiative. And there would be no need to restrict his activities to certain counties, so long as the solicitor also understood English.
Initiatives limited to certain counties would be limited to the languages used in the union of languages used in those counties,
Los Angeles County uses 12 languages. Language coverage is based on the census, and it was determined that LA was covered for Asian(other) and Asian Indian.
Los Angeles determined that they could meet the Asian(other) requirement by providing ballots in Thai and Khmer, and the Asian Indian requirement through Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali. Gujarati and Bengali are not used on ballots, but are available through translators in targeted areas. Presumably ballot titles and summaries would have to be available in Gujarati and Bengali so that the translator could provide the correct version.