Voter Suppresion: A Xenophobic Proposal from Colorado Rep. Coffman

If you don’t speak English fluently, Rep. Mike Coffman wants to make it more difficult for you to vote.

Coffman, a Republican legislator from Colorado, introduced legislation last week that would repeal the part of the Voting Rights Act of 1973 that requires areas with non-English speaking populations—more than 10,000 people or 5 percent of a county—to make ballots available in other languages.

"Since proficiency in English is already a requirement for U.S. citizenship, forcing cash-strapped local governments to provide ballots in a language other than English makes no sense at all," Coffman told the Denver Post.

Coffman’s suggestion follows a disturbing trend of state officials working to prevent some demographics from easily casting their vote, including a wave of voter ID laws that could force millions of Americans to be turned away from the poll booths on Election Day, according to a recent Campus Progress survey.

And there’s, of course, the issue that Coffman’s idea runs counter to the sole purpose of the legislation he’s looking to alter. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was drafted to prevent lawmakers from enacting any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting” or “to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race of color.”

Over the weekend, Coffman took to the editorial pages of the Castle Rock News Press to promote his proposal.

In his guest piece for the News Press, Coffman contends that “the 16 new counties the Obama administration is trying to add to the list will face substantial new expenses.” But it’s unclear what role Coffman believes the Obama administration plays—local governments are required to print bilingual ballots based solely on the number of residents with “limited English proficiency,” based on U.S. Census figures.

In addition to the 16 counties expected to need bilingual ballots for the 2012 election, Colorado has eight counties already printing such ballots and two are required to provide interpreters for members of the Ute tribe in the southwest part of the state.

As Colorado’s secretary of state, Coffman tried his hand at voter suppression and was smacked with legal action and dubbed the Schmuck of the Week by Denver Westword (a title he’s earned a few more times since.) Back in 2007, Coffman decided only to approve voting machines from Premier Election Systems, a company with ties to his congressional campaign. And the following year, a federal judge had to order then-Secretary of State Coffman to stop illegally purging names from Colorado’s voter rolls just days before the election after several groups sued.

While Coffman argues that the bilingual ballot requirement is an “unfunded federal mandate” that places an unnecessary financial burden on counties, Jonathan Shikes of Westword clearly points out the flawed logic there:

Is it unfunded federal mandate? No. If you live in a county where it snows a lot, the county government plows the roads. If you live in a county with a lot of crime, the government hires more police officers. And if you live in a county where a lot of citizens speak another language, you print ballots in that language.

Colorado has been a site of concerning voter suppression for a number of years, including with Coffman’s predecessor Donetta Davidson, who purged roughly one in six Colorado voters from the state’s rolls. (A 2008 Rolling Stone article [PDF] by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Greg Palast highlights the troubling efforts both there and across the country.)

Linda Chavez, the chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, takes the jingoistic rhetoric to another level in a column for Townhall.com in support of altering the Voting Rights Act.

“Our original national motto is ‘E pluribus unum’ – out of many, one,” she writes. “Our common bonds must also include an ability to communicate with one another through a common language: English.”

It’s hard to ignore the clear linguistic contradiction there.

But maybe Chavez is onto something. What is that non-English Latin phrase doing on our American dollars, anyway?  Perhaps Coffman can tackle that next—surely it can’t be too expensive to retract all paper bills, reprint them without that non-American-language phrase, and reissue them all, right?

Brian Stewart is the journalism and online communications manager at Campus Progress.

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