Malden Advocates, Officials Say City Improved Election Accessibility In State Primary

MALDEN, MA — Efforts to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act brought gains for election accessibility in Malden last month, according to multiple stakeholders involved in recent talks with the city.

Work is set to continue. But advocates have said recent changes already mark welcome progress after issues in last year’s municipal election drew criticism from a variety of groups.

“Malden is moving in the right direction in improving election accessibility for all residents,” Poll Monitor Jodie Ng told Patch last week.

Ng watched Malden’s elections on Sept. 6 as in her role with the Asian Outreach Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services.

Just days before the election, Greater Boston Legal Services worked in tandem with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), the Greater Malden Asian American Community Coalition, Malden Mayor Gary Christenson and other to finalize promises from the city to improve translation, bilingual outreach and other services for Malden Chinese-speaking residents with limited English proficiency.

READ: Malden Commits To Chinese Language Election Accessibility Measures

Malden is required to provide certain services under a section of the Voting Rights Act that kicks in for communities where more than five percent of residents speak a given language other than English and have limited English proficiency.

Advocates reached out to the city after it first passed the five percent threshold in 2016. They said they felt they made progress with the city prior to 2021.

Last fall’s municipal elections, though, saw several issues, according to comments in the formal agreement that the city inked with advocates as it made its promises this year.

The city had few bilingual poll workers speaking Chinese, according to the agreement. The agreement then said the lone bilingual poll worker observers saw only spoke the Mandarin dialect of Chinese, which differs from the Cantonese dialect most of Malden’s limited-English proficiency Chinese-speaking voters use.

Oral translation issues led to confusion, the agreement said. The agreement said the city then lacked bilingual signage that could have helped clear up issues.

Where Malden made translations, the work was sometimes sloppy, according to the agreement. Among issues, a translated city website utilized Google Translate to provide information in Chinese. In one instance, the website incorrectly translated “no excuse voting by mail will be allowed in all elections” into Chinese as “voting by mail is not allowed in all elections,” the agreement said.

“When they got to 2020, they'd got pretty far,” Susana Lorenzo-Giguere of the Legal Defense and Education Fund said of the city last week. “But by 2021, they really sort of backtracked.”

Where advocates and legal experts had concerns, Lorenzo-Giguere said they found a willing partner in Christenson and city staff.

“They really weren't looking for a hard line lawsuit approach to resolving this,” Lorenzo-Giguere said. “And so we from AALDEF respected that and took this out-of-court approach.”

Parties moved forward with meetings, laying out specific benchmarks to get Malden into compliance with the Voting Rights Act. The result was a memorandum of understanding in late August.

Lorenzo-Giguere said last week that advocates understood the city would not immediately be able to implement all of its promises in time for the Sept. 6 election.

Still, advocates who watched the Malden election and Malden officials agreed in recent weeks that the state primary election went better than last year’s municipal vote.

“Considering where they were in 2021, they've really made a lot of progress by this,” Lorenzo-Giguere said. “We're really gratified by that.”

Ng said there was an increase in Cantonese-speaking poll workers.

Christenson later shared a document that he said officials compiled to summarize a primary election debrief meeting with advocates and other stakeholders.

The document showed 17 bilingual poll workers/translators were involved in election day work across Malden for September voting. The city translated election materials and provided translated election signage at all its polling places, according to city documentation.

Malden also had professional translators on hand at the City Clerk’s office on election day for the duration of voting.

Among successes, the city noted lingering issues.

It said all voting locations had “Pocket Talk” translators available for use. Some locations were without human translation, though.

In at least one case, a bilingual poll worker scheduled to work at Malden’s Ferryway School voting location did not show up on election day, leaving the city shuffling resources to eventually get a translator to the school in the afternoon. That translator only spoke Mandarin, though, posing more potential challenges for Cantonese-speaking voters.

Efforts to transliterate individual candidate names from English into Chinese charecters on ballots are also currently stuck in limbo out of local control as Malden waits for action on a home rule petition in the state legislature that would approve transliteration.

Advocates rallied in support of the petition at Malden City Hall in August, saying that some voters learn candidate names written in Chinese characters via area Chinese media. Those voters are then sometimes unable to identify the English alphabet name of their preferred candidate.

The petition has backing from Malden’s state legislative delegation. It initially stalled in the State Senate, though, in part over concerns from some in state government about the reliability of name transliterations.

Officials are eyeing a new round of outreach, translated materials and other measures for this year’s November general election.

Speaking last week, Sen. Jason Lewis told Patch that there has additionally been some movement on the transliteration petition, with amendments recently changing the petition's wording to more closely resemble a similar petition already passed for the city of Boston in 2014.

Malden noted those developments in its debrief sheet last week. While transliteration likely won’t be in place locally for this year’s general elections, Lewis and local officials said they are hopeful that the amended petition will win support to pass in time for transliteration for elections in 2023.

"I want to commend both the community and the city for sticking with it," Lorenzo-Giguere said of Malden's election accessibility work. "Nobody just threw their hands up and said forget this."

"I'm really pleased with the resolution," she said.