With the goal of inspiring and preparing every eligible citizen to vote, the American state of California has for the first time ever provided a new voter page that carried ballot information in Hindi for the June 5 primary election.
"Due to the shift in Census 2010 numbers, we were excited to see Thai, Khmer and Hindi added to language requirements in Los Angeles county this year," Tanzila Ahmed at the Asian Pacific American Legal Centre told rediff.com on Tuesday.
Los Angeles county has more than 20,883 Asian Indian voters, according to the 2008 survey, said Ahmed as compared to the rest of the counties in California.
She said "We monitored 14 polls where Hindi material and poll workers were required to be provided to the voters. Also 50 poll monitor volunteered at 100 polls to observe that multilingual (we were specifically tasked to observe Khmer, Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese) materials and bilingual poll workers were provided at the polls."
"We didn't see anyone use the Hindi materials directly. But it does not mean it was not needed -- this election is generally a low-turnout election," she added.
Though Ahmed lamented that there were a couple of instances where a Hindi poll worker was not provided when they should have been or materials were not being displayed when they should have been, but for the most part the poll workers had been compliant with their requests, and nothing egregious had been reported so far.
What is exciting is that the November election will be projected to have a high turn out, and this election helped to get out the kinks of providing Hindi voting materials for when the larger election does happen.
"I was really proud of the effort of the South Asian Network to bring Hindi to the ballot and also the other voting information," Manjusha P Kulkarni, executive director, South Asian Network told rediff.com.
She added, "I hope these efforts will strengthen the voting rights of South Asians across the Los Angeles county. Our efforts have been rewarded and we feel that it is very important for the integration of our community and the overall civic engagement of South Asian Americans in the Los Angeles county -- that they have access through their native tongue."
She believes that the addition of Hindi will make them (Asian Indian) feel as part of the community if their language is being accepted and honoured.
For the first time ever there were poll workers who could speak Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali.
"Often members of our community read English but they don't feel as confident in English as they do in Hindi," acknowledged Kulkarni.
