Last month, our field team hosted a community conversation on making voting easier for eligible Kansans who use a language other than English. Our democracy works best when every citizen can make informed decisions at the ballot box—but right now, many Kansas are forced to choose between voting in a language they don’t fully understand or sitting out of the election entirely. Featured speakers Micah Kubic, ACLU of Kansas Executive Director, and Rafael Gonzalez, El Centro Community Specialist Mobilizer, explore how translating voting materials supports constitutional rights, honors the patriotism and contributions of immigrants, and strengthens our local communities by ensuring every voice is heard.

I want to start out with a short story… My father’s [family] came to this country in the early 1920s because of the Mexican Revolution. They're integrating into American society in the late 1920s. We all know what happened, the Great Depression, President Hubert Hoover, the country went through economic turmoil. And the first people that they blamed were Mexicans. They said that Mexicans were taking people's jobs, so they came up with something called Mexican Repatriation…

My grandmother grew up in St. Gabriel, California a few miles outside of Los Angeles. In front of her house, there was a railroad track… When the Mexican Repatriation was happening, they would round up Mexicans and other Latinos in the same manner that they're doing today. My grandmother saw [immigration enforcement officials] pack people inside of train cars like they were cattle. On an almost daily basis she would see people being sent back to Mexico in front of her house…

A lot of the policies that we are seeing today were used in the past… Immigrants or other minorities have always been the reason to blame for societal issues. This is not the first time we faced this in our recent memory. These stories are very important because as long as there's a story to tell to the next generation, there’s a reminder that that we can fight, and that previous generations have survived this. We're still here.

Folks right now are concerned about democracy in the country. So sometimes when people are worried about the world at large, and they hear we're fighting for language access in Kansas, they say, “What the hell does that have to do with Donald Trump? What does that have to do with the world at large?” They don't see the connection necessarily between what is going on in the world and language access. It's important for us to say that these fights are one and the same. Pretending like they are separate is a mistake.

The only way that we're going to get out of what we face right now is by making sure that people get to participate by making sure that participation is as broad as possible. That everybody has the chance to speak up. So, unless we're really making our elections inclusive so that everybody can participate, we're never going to get where we need to go.

If you are concerned about creeping authoritarianism taking over the nation and democracy being disrupted, it is important to remember that authoritarianism is not just about one person. For authoritarianism to take root, a bunch of other people up and down the line have to agree to go along with it. Not just the president, not just the vice president, not just the Cabinet, not just the Congress, but lots of other people, too. And most importantly for our purposes, local governments have to agree to go along with it too. We know that for sure, because of the way the administration is trying to get local police agencies, local law enforcement agencies to do immigration enforcement for them. Partly, it's because they don't have the peoplepower to do all the things they want to do on their own. But also, it's about asserting control. It's about taking over those local agencies to stamp out defiance and dissent.

What has that got to do with language access? One of the reasons that we are doing this campaign, particularly in the places that we are doing it, is as a way of stiffening the spine of local elected officials. Reminding them about why democracy is important. Reminding them about what their constituencies want and believe in, and preparing them to say “no” for when the federal government says, “I want you to do this.” It is also a way of staving off authoritarianism.

So, we [fight for language access] for two reasons: We do it for participation, we do it because it's the right thing to do around inclusion. But we also do it because it's the way that we are going to brace ourselves, prepare ourselves, and stop our local government officials from going along with things that we don't want them to later on. It's practice. Those two things mean that language access is super, super important. Having multilingual materials is super, super important. Even before you get to the big principal value arguments about the Constitution and our rights. The tactical, the strategic reasons are real, and the Constitutional reason is real too.

The Constitution doesn't say that your right to vote depends on what language you speak. The Constitution doesn't say your right to vote depends on whether we have voter registration materials that you can read or not. It just says you have a right to vote, period. So, our job is to make sure that that is as widely accessed as possible. All of those are reasons we're doing this. All of those are reasons why this is a fight worth having, work worth doing, a community worth building.

Help us take action to defend democracy and voting rights in Kansas. We're asking for public pressure on Secretary of State Schwab to support expanding language access for voting in Wyandotte and Johnson County. Copy and paste one of these messages and share on social media: