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When I arrived at the polling place shortly after 7 am, two teenage girls I was supposed to meet were already there, busily scribbling notes as they studied multilingual signs taped to the wall. Roaming around the tiny gymnasium, they examined stacks of election materials and counted voting booths. Every few minutes, they conferred with each other in hushed tones, and then jotted down their findings on a checklist. Their goal for this June 5 California primary election was to identify and document any obstacles to voting, particularly for Asian Americans with limited English proficiency.

Ky Duyen Hoang and Diep Huynh were excused from their morning high school classes so that they could serve as poll monitors. Ironically, they have never cast a ballot, and they have probably never set foot inside a polling place before. Only Hoang is of voting age, and neither she nor Huynh are citizens. They both immigrated from communist Vietnam less than five years ago. Yet here they stood, scrutinizing the mechanisms of American democracy, looking to  secure a vote for everybody entitled to one.

We were inside a rec center in Oakland’s San Antonio district, home to a large Vietnamese population, along with many other Asian communities and a sizeable Latino and African American contingent. The dozen or so poll workers on duty reflected those demographics, and several wore badges indicating their ability to speak different languages. In addition to this personal support, written explanations and instructions in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and Vietnamese appeared on all sorts of posters and pamphlets arranged throughout the gym. Piles of bilingual ballots sat ready for use. This polling place seemed sufficiently equipped to handle the needs of nearby residents.

Few residents, however, took advantage, at least while we were there. In the hour the girls and I spent at the rec center, I saw only two voters pass through, a surprisingly low number considering that this polling place covered two precincts. On our way out, I asked a poll worker about the turnout. Based on his previous experience at the site, he predicted they might end up getting 100 voters total, “if we’re lucky.”

Admittedly, primaries typically generate lukewarm interest, and this one lacked a major draw. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney officially wrapped up his party’s nomination in Texas on May 29, nullifying the importance of the biggest race on the California primary ballot. This could have potentially dampened voter enthusiasm in the San Antonio district, given what I was recently told by a young Vietnamese American school teacher who claimed that the older generation tends to register Republican.

While Vietnamese voters of any party might not have strong reason to care about the contests in this primary, the inclusion of Vietnamese language assistance alone should be some cause for excitement. June 5 marked the debut of such assistance in Oakland and throughout the rest of Alameda County. Brought on thanks to federal law, this new development dramatically boosts the Vietnamese community’s political prospects. The county has roughly 20,000 eligible Vietnamese American voters, but less than half of them can navigate a ballot in English, according to the Census Bureau. Therefore, introducing a bilingual ballot effectively doubles their community’s electoral power.

Part of Hoang and Huynh’s duty was to safeguard that power. Their new role represented a far cry from the life they knew as kids. As we strolled over to a second polling place, they discussed the contrast between their homeland and the United States, and Hoang revealed that people get thrown in jail for saying bad things about the government in Vietnam. But when you monitor polls, you can easily end up saying bad things about the government. You are actually obliged to do so in certain unfortunate situations.

Such situations have played out in Alameda County in the past. Complaints by residents prompted the Department of Justice (DOJ) to sue the county in 2010 for failing to adequately provide mandatory voting assistance in Chinese and Spanish, after a similar suit in 1995 (regarding shortcomings with Chinese assistance only).

For this election, the potential for complications bumped up a notch with the addition of assistance not only in Vietnamese, but in Tagalog as well. Given the county’s track record, many eyes were watching to see if problems occur again. The DOJ announced intentions to monitor polls here, and civil rights organization Asian Law Caucus (ALC) conscripted many poll monitors of its own, including Hoang and Huynh.

Our next destination turned out to be a private residence, and the strangest polling place I’m sure I’ll ever see. Voting booths and information tables crowded a small, dark foyer featuring stained glass windows, purple tapestries, and a bighorn sheep’s head mounted over an ornate bar that looked like it came straight out of an old Western saloon. Three of the five poll workers here spoke Vietnamese, which seemed like more than enough to accommodate the meager traffic. During our roughly 45-minute visit, no Vietnamese voters dropped by. A middle-aged Japanese woman did, and the girls asked her if she ever experienced voter discrimination, and she answered no.

Generally, people envision voter discrimination as an overt and malicious attempt to block access to the polls. Sometimes, though, it just occurs by accident. This was what happened before in Alameda County, as I learned from Carlo De La Cruz, the coordinator of ALC’s poll monitoring efforts. He explained that with the county’s limited resources, it has had trouble serving the whole spectrum of its incredibly diverse electorate, and inadvertently neglected the needs of certain folks who simply got lost in the shuffle.

“We’re not saying that Alameda County was racist toward Asian American voters and that they were trying to disenfranchise [those voters],” he said, “But the effect was still the same, where Asian American voters couldn’t vote to their fullest potential.”

To what extent the county has been able to address this injustice remains an open question, since it could still improve on the way it holds elections overall. This was rather evident at the third and final polling place on Hoang and Huynh’s list. We found it at a Catholic elementary school, inside a stark and cavernous utility room. A mild tension filled the air, something I did not notice at the previous sites, but then this one had a steadier stream of voters passing through. The girls approached an older Asian woman on her way out. After a brief exchange, she jerked a thumb in the direction of the poll workers and grumbled, “They don’t know what they’re doing.” Later, Hoang and Huynh mentioned to me that two Vietnamese poll workers here said they felt confused about their duties.

The girls were not the only ones observing all this. DOJ sent four poll monitors to this location as well. Dressed in conservative business attire, they were probably three times the age of their ALC counterparts. They hovered close to the action, armed with clipboards and stony-faced stares. In response to my attempts at conversation, I was given a phone number for official press inquiries. These people had no use for idle chatter. They intimidated me, actually, but the poll workers did not seem to pay the DOJ people much attention.

DOJ continued to stay tight-lipped following the election, too. The next day, I dialed the press hotline and spoke with a public affairs representative who declined to comment on the department’s findings. ALC, on the other hand, issued a press release before the polls closed. It claimed to have uncovered “deficiencies” that “made it more difficult to cast a ballot for voters with limited proficiency in English.”

I left a message with the registrar of voters asking for that office's take, but no one got back to me. However, I did reach Lai Van Luu, a community member who the county recruited to help with voter outreach leading up to the election. He informed me via email that all the Vietnamese people he talked to reported having a pleasant voting experience.

None of this captured a definitive sense of how well Alameda County served the Vietnamese electorate on the June 5 primary. However, based on what I witnessed in Oakland that day, the community appeared to be receiving some pretty valuable support. Hoang and Huynh also endorsed this view and offered positive opinions once we wrapped up our tour. Of course, receiving support does not mean much if you do not do something with it.

“I think [there was] a lot of assistance in Vietnamese, but I didn’t see any Vietnamese who were voting,” Hoang said.

 

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This post is part of Hyphen Politics, an ongoing series that looks at where Asian America and politics intersect in the run-up to the 2012 general election.