Lawsuit says city erred on translations

By Charles Sercombe
A Hamtramck woman and a Detroit-based voting rights organization say the city failed to provide accurate Bengali-language translations in the 2020 elections.
With the assistance of New York-based legal organization Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Northville law firm Salvatore, Prescott, Porter and Porter, a lawsuit has been filed in federal court.
The accusations include:
• That Hamtramck failed to provide accurate ballot translations in Bengali.
• That the city has not translated into Bengali any part of the city’s election website.
• That the city failed to recruit, train and assign a “sufficient number of Bengali-speaking poll workers and interpreters to provide effective Bengali-language assistance.”
The lawsuit says the city was notified of these shortcomings in 2020, but failed to take corrective action.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Detroit Action, an organization that “promotes the involvement of black and brown community members in the electoral process,” and a Bengali-American resident, Rahima Begum.
Detroit Action says that it has been spending its own money to send election-related messages to the Bengali community, which the organization says that is something the city should have been doing.
The Michigan Secretary of State has been in charge of overseeing translations of ballots and election information for the Bengali and Arab communities in Hamtramck.
The Michigan Secretary of State Office is not included in the lawsuit.
Hamtramck has been obligated by federal election officials to provide election translations since 2011.
Former City Clerk August Gitschlag, who supervised Hamtramck elections, said he received only a handful of complaints about the Bengali translations.
He said there have been differences of opinion on which Bengali dialect to use.
A Hamtramck-based Bengali business owner, who asked not to be identified, said the translations have indeed been poor – akin to Google translations, which are notoriously inaccurate.
The business owner said some of the election translations were incomprehensible, but also said that very few Hamtramck Bengali voters actually need the translations.
City Manager Kathy Angerer declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says that, according to Census statistics, there are almost 1,000 Bengali voters in town, of whom 570 have limited English reading and speaking skills.
The lawsuit further alleges that, during the 2020 Primary Election, the city failed to provide Bengali-language Democratic ballots at the Community Center until after 6 p.m. on election day. The lawsuit says that the ballots were eventually found under “stacks of other items.”
Also alleged in the 2020 General Election, the translation on the Bengali sample ballot was filled with errors, including misspellings and wrongly placed vowels, and “used an improper dialect” for Bengalis living in Hamtramck.
Other allegations include that the city failed to provide Bengali-speaking poll workers during the entire election day. In the precincts in the Community Center, translators weren’t on site until 7 p.m. – an hour before polls closed, the lawsuit says.
Co-plaintiff Rahima Begum said, in the lawsuit, that she had difficulty in understanding election information.
The Review reached out to the Northville law firm representing Begum to interview her, but the firm turned down that request.
The lawsuit seeks to have the city take corrective actions and reimburse the plaintiffs for legal fees.
Posted June 25, 2021