fanatic has been defined as "one who confronted with failure redoubles his efforts." Lani Guiner, once nominated to be assistant attorney general for civil rights under Bill Clinton, once again demonstrates herself to be a fanatic. Guiner urges, among other things, "meaningful assistance to semi-literate or non-English-speaking voters" in a column for the New York Times ("A New Voting Rights Movement," December 18, 2000).

New York County has attempted to provide bilingual ballots in Chinese since 1992. The question is begged: how "meaningful" has that "assistance" been? The answer: not very.

Consider the 2000 election. In New York City's Flushing community, the Chinese bilingual ballot translated the "Democratic" label on all state races as "Republican," while "Republican" was translated as "Democratic."

A bilingual Cantonese-English speaker, Kymie Hwang, told the Village Voice that "the Cantonese instructions given on the Board of Elections voter hotline were so poor that…she had to listen to them in English before she could understand the Cantonese."

There was also an absentee ballot problem. The English directions for voting in the race for state Supreme Court justice read "Vote for any THREE." The Chinese ballot first told people to "Vote for any FIVE" and then to "Vote for any THREE."

Peter Lau of the Chinatown Voter Education Alliance told the Voice that "translation mistakes happen every year" on Chinese ballots. Perhaps the most famous error was a referendum in which the English word "yes" was translated as the Chinese for "no."

New York wasn't the only place with translation troubles this year. According to a report by the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, Ivy Korman, the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections' liaison with law enforcement, has asked the FBI to investigate misleading "palm cards" which claimed to tell folks how to vote for Gore but instead gave Bush's number on the ballot.

Haitian activist (and a Gore delegate to the Democratic convention earlier this year) Margaret Armand explained to the Sun-Sentinel why this was a problem: "[Haitians without] a command of the English language vote only by number." She added:

They wanted to confuse the Haitian people. They knew they were going to vote for Gore. The only way to (prevent) that was to change the number and confuse us. Ninety-nine percent of Haitians vote for Democrats.

Keep in mind that in 1950, Congress added the requirement that persons who wish to become citizens must "demonstrate an understanding of the English language, including an ability to read, write and speak words in ordinary usage in the English language." Since only citizens may legally vote, immigrants who have became naturalized citizens since 1950 might be expected to be able to comprehend G - O - R - E. with only moderate difficulty.

Bilingual-voting supporters like Guiner also forget that even government-provided "interpreters" have been shown to be sowing confusion rather than clarity. Amidst the most recent efforts to reauthorize the bilingual-ballot provisions of the Voting Rights Act, former U.S. assistant attorney general John Dunne told Congress that during the 1988 and 1990 elections:

[E]ven when translators were available, the message conveyed to minority language voters often did not resemble the issue on the ballot and it was impossible for a minority language individual to cast an informed vote.

Oral interpreters may also have a partisan agenda. Poll watchers may well run into difficulty protecting voters from "translators" whose "assistance" amounts to "vote for him — good Democrat."

Rather than encouraging lawyers to quarrel over translations before and after elections — a process which, in a nation where over 300 languages are spoken, will assure endless litigation — it is high time that the government got out of the translation business entirely.

Professional ethnic activists would do well to learn that the taxpayers need not pay for everything that anyone considers worth doing. Already, both the Republican and Democratic parties voluntarily produce materials in languages other than English to seek votes. Such efforts can be expected to continue.

Chinese, Haitian and Serbo-Croatian activists alike should feel free to translate, distribute, and pay for their own voting materials as they see fit.

The advantage of these unofficial translations is simple: the folks receiving them know to take them with a grain (or a pound) of salt — just like any other piece of literature handed out at the polls. In fact, anyone taking one of these partisan translations would almost certainly be aware of a concept summarized by a bit of Latin: caveat lector (let the reader beware).