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Language minority provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) require that certain states and political subdivisions provide language assistance during elections for certain language minority groups who are unable to speak or understand English adequately enough to participate in the electoral process. The language provisions of the VRA were introduced in the 1975 reauthorization with the first listing of Section 203 covered jurisdictions being issued following the 1980 Census. The determinations were released again following the 1990 and 2000 Census as prescribed by law. The 2006 reauthorization of the VRA extended the language provisions through the year 2032 and instructed the Census Bureau on two changes: use the American Community Survey as the primary data source; and conduct the determinations every five years rather than every ten years, as was done previously.
The language minority groups covered by Section 203 are those that speak Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, and Spanish languages.
Determinations for each state, county or county subdivision (depending on which is the operating level of government), and American Indian Areas/Alaska Native Areas (AIA/ANA), are then computed based on the following:
Or
And
Then
Notes:
Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act relates to provisions requiring the use of election materials in languages other than English for states or political subdivisions when their voting age population have certain characteristics. Data from the 2010 Census and the American Community Survey (ACS) provide counts and estimates for these characteristics. The ACS is a general purpose sample survey designed to produce a large volume of estimates across the spectrum of the nation’s geographic areas and subgroups of the population. This document describes a small area model which was developed and applied to provide improved estimates of characteristics for states and political subdivisions relating to citizenship, limited-English proficiency, and illiteracy. Methods of constructing point estimates under an empirical Bayes procedure are detailed. Methods for estimating the precision of the estimates are described in an appendix.
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