In an effort to prevent disenfranchising ethnic voters during the 2024 presidential elections, Los Angeles County will pursue creation of additional in-person voting centers in non-English speaking communities, and will incentivize the hiring of bilingual polling workers.
An initiative including a broad array of actions was ordered by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Sept. 12. The L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is required to increase engagement with diverse communities in the county, where some 200 languages other than English are spoken in immigrant households.
“We must consistently fine-tune and enhance how we are engaging with these voters,” said First District Supervisor Hilda Solis, who co-authored the motion with Fourth District Supervisor Janice Hahn. It was adopted unanimously.
Solis mentioned the absence of voting centers in Koreatown and Chinatown shortly before the June 2022 primary. Only after the problem was brought to the county’s attention were some smaller, makeshift voting centers added to neighborhoods where many voters speak Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese.
“Regarding voting centers, some of the criteria (for choosing locations) was preventing us from having vote centers. We want vote centers,” said Nancy Yap, executive director of the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment (CAUSE), during the meeting.
Rick Eng, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, said in an interview on Monday that his group has worked with the Registrar-Recorder since 2018 to place smaller voting centers with only two machines — known as “flex vote centers” — at the group’s headquarters in Chinatown. He expects to see voting machines at their Bamboo Lane office next year.
He said the supervisors’ motion was part of a “reasonable request” from the board. He said his group and Dean Logan, the county’s Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, have been working…
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