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Chicago voters can cast ballots in 12 different languages this election, an expansion that Illinois Republican Party Chairman Bob Grogan warns is making an already complicated election system harder to independently monitor.
Grogan told Digital the proliferation of versions in languages such as Tagalog, Gujarati and Urdu creates additional challenges for election judges and party observers tasked with ensuring voters receive accurate ballots. He also questioned how many voters need some of the translations, arguing that many immigrants who speak those languages also speak English.
“It’s a solution in search of a problem,” Grogan told Digital. “It’s big city virtue signaling.”
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A voter casts their ballot at a polling location. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Chicago voters can cast ballots in 12 different languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog, Polish, Gujarati, Urdu, Ukrainian, Arabic and Russian.
Section 203 of the U.S. Voting Rights Act requires the Chicago Board of Elections to make materials and ballots available in certain precincts for Spanish, Chinese and Hindi speakers, a spokesperson for the elections agency told Digital. The Board includes the other non-English languages to “maintain uniformity with the languages used by the Cook County Clerk’s office under a county ordinance, so that all voters throughout Cook County are afforded equal voting opportunities,” the spokesperson added.
But Grogan, a former DuPage County auditor for 12 years, said he has “a fair number of Gujarati friends … and everyone in their family speaks English.”
“Gujarati — it’s from India, and English is an official language in India,” Grogan added.
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Signage at a polling site inside the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building in Denver, Colorado, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (Photographer: Michael Ciaglo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Data provided to Digital by the Chicago Board of Elections shows that some of the less commonly used language options accounted for only a handful of ballots cast during the March primary. Just nine ballots were cast using the English-Gujarati option, while 15 used English-Urdu, 10 used English-Arabic and 25 each used English-Russian and English-Ukrainian, according to the Board’s figures.
Other translations were used more frequently, including 4,474 English-Polish ballots, 2,183 English-Chinese ballots, 664 English-Hindi ballots, 352 English-Korean ballots and 100 English-Tagalog ballots.
Grogan also questioned why language requirements can change substantially across county lines, noting that Chicago offers touchscreen ballots in 12 languages while nearby DuPage County offers fewer language options.
“You can have a Gujarati population in Peoria,” Grogan said. “You would think that there would be some more uniformity to all of that as well.”
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Beyond questioning the need for some of the translations, Grogan raised a broader concern about oversight, arguing that election judges and party observers cannot independently scrutinize ballots written in languages they do not understand.
However, the Chicago Board of Elections pushed back, telling Digital that it has in-house staff who help translate ballots and signs and assist multilingual media ahead of elections. It also said voters are allowed to bring “interpreter[s] to assist them in understanding and casting their ballot” under certain conditions.
When asked about multilingual judges, the Board noted that of the 7,218 election judges assigned for November’s general election as of Thursday, 810 are multilingual candidates. Those multilingual judges include speakers of Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Polish, Korean and Tagalog, according to the Board.
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Pressed on whether he believes the additional languages create an election security vulnerability, Grogan said the risk depends in part on how widely the translated ballots are used.
Overall, the Board’s figures show 7,857 multilingual ballots were cast during the March primary, representing about 1.85% of the 424,564 ballots cast citywide.
“I think it certainly makes it harder to monitor,” Grogan said. “If there is one ballot cast in that language, that’s a very small vulnerability you have. If all of a sudden we have 10,000 in some very small, poorly understood language, then that increases the risk.”
Digital asked the Chicago Board of Elections how many languages are available for mail-in ballots but did not receive a response in time for publication.
