Alaska Multilingual Ballot and Voter Services – CEO Appearance on the study on Indigenous languages on ballots before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

Key considerations from the meeting between Elections Canada and the Alaska Division of Elections:

Alaska has adopted a phased, incremental approach to its multilingual service provision, recognizing the complexity of content and logistics.
Currently, Alaska only offers facsimile ballots in Alaskan Native languages but hopes to eventually offer translated official ballots.
Only one language appears on the sample/facsimile ballot papers, each ballot is printed separately for each language.
Audio ballots on voting machines are currently available in Indigenous languages.
While Alaska is dealing with many different Indigenous languages, they are all written using the Latin alphabet.
Candidate registration is completed two months prior to the election date, facilitating translation and printing of materials in different languages.
Elections are always fixed-date, facilitating planning.
Translation panels, created with the support of the communities, are in continuous use and have been successful.
However, availability of language experts can be a challenge, especially for those languages where there is no translation panel currently convened.

Federal multilingual services framework:

In the US, requirements to provide multilingual voter materials and ballots were established in 1975 by Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act.
All election material, including ballots, that are available in English must also be made available in minority languages for specific, covered jurisdictions.
Covered jurisdictions are determined every 5 years by the Census Bureau, through a formula set out in the Voting Rights Act, including number of minority language speakers and illiteracy rates.
Section 203 recognizes specific characteristics for Native American and Alaskan Native language, mandating separate determinations for Indian Reservations.
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice offers guidance to local election officials on how to comply with language minority provisions.
These guidelines establish that when a language used by a group is unwritten only oral assistance and publicity are required for voters.
Also, when oral assistance is mandatory for a language that has several dialects, the jurisdiction's obligation is to ascertain the dialects that are commonly used by members of the applicable language minority group and to provide oral assistance in such dialects.

Alaska Native communities and languages:

Alaska has eleven distinct Native Alaskan cultures and at least twenty distinct Indigenous languages and dialects, including historically unwritten languages.
In the 2020 census, roughly 22% of the state population (160,287) was Native American and Alaskan Native, the highest in the US.
The size of Alaskan Native communities does not necessarily correspond to the number of speakers of that community's language, in most cases the number of speakers is much smaller than the overall community (ex. 15,700 Inupiaq but only 2,144 speakers of the Inupiaq language).
The majority of Native Alaskan language speakers belong to the Eskimo-Aleut Family, which comprises of three subgroups; Aleut, Yup'ik (spoken in Alaska and Russia), and Inuit (which includes Alaskan Inupiak and the different languages spoken by Inuit in Canada and Greenland).
Central Alaska Yup'ik has the largest number of speakers (10,000), followed by Inupiat (2,144), Siberian Yup'ik (1,000).
The other major language group is Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit, including speakers of Gwich'in (175) and Tlingit (150).
Since 1977 the different Inuit communities of Alaska are part of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) which represents approximately 155,000 Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia.
The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) is the state's largest statewide Native organization including federally recognized tribes, village and regional corporations, and NGOs.

Alaskan multilingual services requirements:

Alaskan Native communities, with the Native American Rights Fund and ACLU, twice successfully sued Alaska's Division of Elections (in 2007 and 2013) for failing to comply with the Voting Right Act and provide voting material translations and information to Alaska Native voters.
In 2015, the second lawsuit (Toyukak v. Mallott), led to a settlement agreement, the Toyukak Order, between the parties, which included several conditions such as:
- Providing the translations of election materials (including the Official Election Pamphlet) and language assistance in various Yup'ik dialects and Gwich'in;
- Providing glossaries of election terms in the Yup'ik dialects and Gwich'in to assist outreach workers and poll workers with their translations;
- Instituting a translation panel for Yup'ik (8 members) and for Gwich'in (at least three members);
- Having at least one bilingual translator available for each language and dialect spoken in three areas to provide language assistance by phone;
- Providing translated sample ballots (posted approximately 50 days prior to Election Day), voter registration forms, permanent absentee voting procedures, and touchscreen voting machines.
The Toyakuk Order also mandated specific procedures to ensure uniform oral and written translations of election-related terminology which only existed in English.
In 2016, the Census Bureau formula determined that Alaska was required to provide services in Yup'ik, Aleut, Inupiat, Alaskan Athabascan (including Gwich'in), Tagalog, and Spanish.
The 2021 notice reduced the linguistic obligation to services in Yup'ik, Aleut, Inupiat and Tagalog, though the Division of Elections has decided to offer services even when not required by federal law.
The Division seeks to expand its future service offerings, based on an incremental approach of ensuring the quality of existing services before expanding into new areas.

Current Service Offerings

Currently Alaska offers facsimile ballots in a range of Alaskan Native languages, which are available at polling places, provided to local Tribal councils, and sent to voters.
Facsimile ballots are available both digitally and printed so voters can use them as a reference when marking the English language ballots.
Official printed ballots in languages other than English are not currently available, though the Division seeks to implement these at a later date.
Audio ballots on voting machines are available in the all the offered Alaskan Native languages, while the text is in English, the audio is in the Indigenous language.
Alaska hopes to eventually roll-out official ballot papers in Indigenous languages.
Candidate registration deadlines are 2 months prior to election day, which are always fixed-date; facilitating translation of election material in different languages.
The current translation protocol requires that Indigenous language materials be ready 30 days prior to the English version.
Using standardized forms allows for processing of applications in different languages.
Bilingual staff are recruited and trained for outreach and support at the polls for different languages, often the same individual within a community.

Language assistance plan and translation:

The Division of Elections has created a language assistance plan to guide its translation and oral assistance historically written and unwritten Alaska Native languages.
The Division convened and paid for Yup'ik and Gwich'in translation panels, members who spoke the languages were selected based on the recommendations of local Tribal councils and the Native American Rights Fund.
The translation panels are in continuous use and provide the translation service/capacity for election materials in their respective languages.
Average turnaround for translations is usually about 2 weeks.
Alaska also translates its civic education materials, for example the recent information about ranked-choice voting implementation.
Availability of language experts can be a challenge, especially for those languages where there is no translation panel currently convened.
Community engagement, through proactive relationship building with Tribal Councils and other trusted local groups was key to ensure materials were accepted and used.
The Division of Elections has published a Yup'ik glossary of election terms that included all Yup'ik dialects and Nunivak Cup'ig and a written and audio glossary of terms in Gwich'in.
To develop the Yup'ik glossary, the panel combined an existing glossary in General Central Yup'ik with terms provided by the Native American Rights Fund, totaling to a list of 179 terms.
For the 2016 election cycle, the Division of Elections produced 70 Official Election Pamphlet (OEP) translated in Alaska Native languages. According to the US Commission on Civil Rights, completing the OEP presented an ongoing challenge for the Division of Election's translation capabilities.
The large number of languages/dialects necessitated a great amount of work at a time of the year when many of the translation panel members had other demands on their schedules.