New voter registration forms in an additional five languages on display at the city’s July 14 briefing at the Homecrest Library in Brooklyn (Photo by Alex Ayala for Voices of NY)
New York City will offer voter registration forms in five additional languages – Russian, Urdu, Haitian Creole, French and Arabic – to expand voter participation and access, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on July 14 at a briefing held at the Homecrest Library in Brooklyn.
Voter registration forms have previously been available only in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Bangla.
The initiative will mean that accessible voter registration forms will now be available to 80 percent of eligible NYC voters with limited English proficiency, said Nisha Agarwal, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. Agarwal said that the city would continue to expand the scope of these efforts in 2016, and hoped to add voter registration forms in Yiddish, Italian, Polish, Greek, Albanian and Tagalog. [Editor’s update: On. Sept. 20, the mayor’s office announced that forms would be made available in those six languages, giving more than 90 percent of Limited English Proficient New Yorkers access to voter registration forms in the language they speak at home.]
The city is also working on trying to make interpreters in numerous languages available at the polls to assist voters with limited English proficiency in casting their votes.
The language access is part of a broader effort to increase participation in the electoral process. The mayor has also issued a directive expanding requirements for agency-based voter registration, which includes a requirement that 19 agencies be ready to help people complete voter registration forms if they are asked to do so. The city administration is also implementing a pilot project to provide electronic, agency-based voter registration.
Joining in the city’s initiative to expand voter registration are several immigrant community organizations, including AALDEF (Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund), African Communities Together, Arab American Family Support Center, CAMBA, Make the Road New York, MUNA NY and Shorefront YM-YWHA of Brighton-Manhattan Beach.
The new forms will be available on the Campaign Finance Board website (www.nyccfb.info), which is also found on the homepage of NYC.gov under “Register to Vote.”