Russel Sage Foundation

Ten years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) enabled the enfranchisement of African-Americans, the VRA expanded to include the language minority groups of Asian-Americans and Latinos in coverage. The rationale behind this expansion was that the use of English-only ballots and voter information prevented linguistic minorities from voting; much the way poll taxes or literacy tests in the Jim Crow south posed an obstacle to African-American political participation. Section 203e of the VRA now mandates the provision of translated voting materials in counties where linguistic minority citizens number 10,000 people or more.

Despite this provision, voter registration rates among Latino and Asian-American voters lag behind those of African-Americans and non-Hispanic whites. With support from the Foundation, political scientist Michael Jones-Correa will investigate these ethnic differences in voting rates in 100 counties covered by the VRA. He hypothesizes that those counties that have most rigorously enforced the VRA will have higher rates of minority voter participation. So far, he has trained several Cornell students to contact county registrars and do on-site inspections of voter registration materials in each county. This data will then be merged into an analysis of registration and voting data on eligible Latinos and Asian-Americans in these counties. Once the study is complete, Jones-Correa will submit two articles to academic journals for publication.