Colorado Strengthens Access to Ballots in Spanish

Some 30 years ago, volunteers with Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign knocked on Patty Hernandez’s door in Denver. Hernandez, a U.S.-born citizen who was raised in Mexico, at the time spoke fluent Spanish and limited English. After she told the door-knockers that she wanted to vote but didn’t know how, they gave her a pamphlet on voter registration, written in English that she could not understand. 

Hernandez eventually figured out how to register, but then came another challenge: interpreting the ballot itself. “I had to ask a cousin, ‘What does this mean?’ I didn’t know what it said,” she told Bolts. She declined to vote on issues she couldn’t comprehend.

Now 57, Hernandez is more comfortable speaking English, but observes many family members, who also live in Colorado, still struggling with voting as she once did. “Many of them would rather not vote, because they don’t understand,” she said. “I know how that feels. You want to support the place that you live, but you don’t know how.” Her relatives are among the roughly 125,000 Coloradans who are eligible to vote and who report speaking English “less than very well,” according to census data analyzed by the voting rights group Common Cause Colorado. 

With these voters in mind, Colorado lawmakers this spring adopted reforms that will improve access to ballots in Spanish, which should benefit tens of thousands of voters. 

Senate Bill 1, a landmark package called the Colorado Voting Rights Act that the Democratic majorities in the state legislature adopted last month, includes requirements that dozens of cities provide multilingual ballots during local elections, bridging a major gap in access for voting in those races. 

Some places in Colorado, including Denver, already print ballots in both Spanish and English for every election. But until the passage of SB 1, each city was left to decide whether to provide multilingual ballots—and many places with large numbers of non-native English speakers chose not to do so. Frustrated by this, voting rights advocates pushed for stronger mandates, and are now celebrating their success with SB 1. 

Still, the advocates also stress that the bill leaves several gaps in place. They warn that language access will remain weaker for voters who speak a language other than English and Spanish, for instance, and they vow to keep pressing for fixes. “We want others to not go through what we went through,” said Hernandez, who today serves on the steering committee of the Colorado Language Access Coalition.

The headlining aim of SB 1 is to enshrine a slew of voter protections in state law, a reaction to voting rights advocates’ concern that they can no longer rely on the federal Voting Rights Act and its myriad protections, which include baseline rules for language accommodations. 

In the past, the U.S. Department of Justice has sued local governments that violate these accommodations, but Donald Trump’s administrations have been hostile to such enforcement. The DOJ didn’t file a single lawsuit on language protections between 2017 and 2020, and so far this year the department has picked up where Trump’s first presidency left off, quickly gutting its voting rights division. Conservative federal judges have also decimated various protections of the VRA. 

This has left millions of Americans largely at the mercy of whatever protections and enforcement mechanisms exist in their own states—hence the need for SB 1, its supporters say.

SB 1 intends to mimic, and build on, the federal VRA’s protections by prohibiting election practices that suppress or dilute the rights of protected groups, while ensuring that voters can sue in state courts when they feel their rights have been violated. Colorado joined eight other states that have adopted their own voting rights acts.

The bill’s backers intended all along to codify language protections in state law, said Jennifer Bacon, a Democrat who sponsored SB 1 and serves as assistant majority leader in the state House. But she said this became an even greater priority when Trump returned to the White House to target government initiatives that, like multilingual programs, are meant to promote inclusion. 

“Every year,” Bacon told Bolts, “the Black and Latino caucuses hear how polling suggests we need to talk about immigration and immigrants less. … But we believe in this, so let’s do it.” 

Bacon, who represents one of the most diverse legislative districts in Colorado, added, “I can see with my own eyes that language access is important to my neighbors and constituents… The ability to be able to participate in a community and country they love, in their own language, is just priceless.”

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The changes in SB 1 build on an earlier Colorado law, passed in 2021, which required certain counties to provide sample ballots online in non-English languages and to offer a translated ballot to anyone voting in person who requested one. That law applied to any county in which census data indicate that at least 2,000 citizens, or at least 2.5 percent of the electorate over 18, speaks English “less than very well.” Twenty of Colorado’s 64 counties meet those thresholds, the secretary of state says. 

But the 2021 law also did not address municipal elections, like races for mayor and local ballot measures. 

Now, under SB 1, Colorado towns and cities will also be required to provide multilingual ballots as long as they have at least 3,000 residents and fall wholly or partially within the bounds of any of the 20 counties covered by the 2021 law. Census data indicate that about 60 Colorado cities meet those thresholds. 

Jorge Hernandez, another member of the Colorado Language Access Coalition, who has no relation to Patty Hernandez, said he hopes these new requirements will build on the 2021 law by empowering more people to vote in municipal elections. He is a first-generation son of Mexican immigrants, and he has often held family reunions around elections to translate complex ballot materials for Spanish-speaking relatives. “It is a moment where their voices can be heard,” he said, “but they have to overcome that barrier.”

Aly Belknap, executive director of Common Cause Colorado and a primary author of SB 1, agrees that providing more multilingual ballots will arm voters with greater confidence. She expects the reforms to reduce voters’ need to seek translation from unofficial sources, like Google Translate, from family members who may themselves not understand elections well—or even from a boss or authority figure who may seek to distort ballot content or influence someone’s vote. “We want to continue to enable folks to vote independently,” Belknap told Bolts. 

Now she is looking ahead. “We’re planning now how we want to engage on implementation, on the public roll-out,” Belknap said. “We’re going to work with grassroots groups to let voters know what’s available to them.”

Still, while advocates for language access say they’re glad that the state is continuing to make progress, many also regret that the recent reforms leave significant gaps where multilingual services won’t be available. 

The new reforms, for one, won’t benefit non-English speakers who speak a language other than Spanish. No Colorado county has a high enough population of people who primarily speak a language other than English or Spanish to be covered by the bill, its authors said. 

Common Cause’s analysis shows that about 60 percent of voting-eligible Coloradans who report speaking English “less than very well” speak Spanish. That leaves 40 percent of this group, or roughly 50,000 people, who will continue to not see ballots in their native languages.

“We need to make sure non-Spanish, non-English speakers can effectively vote,” said Evaristo Gomez Jr., civic engagement manager with the organization Mi Familia en Acción, which works to promote voting in Spanish-speaking communities in Colorado and eight other states. “There’s such a huge gap, when people don’t feel educated enough on the issues, don’t understand what’s on the ballot.” 

Proponents of SB 1 explain that the scope of their bill, like that of the 2021 law, was constrained in part by the limited capacity and financial resources of election offices. 

In an effort to meet the needs of people who speak neither English nor Spanish, lawmakers included in the 2021 law a mandate that the secretary of state create and run a hotline that people could call to access ballot translation services in languages other than English and Spanish.

But this hotline has accomplished little since being activated in 2022. Only 34 people total have ever called into it, the secretary of state’s office told Bolts. The state’s committee on language access chalked this up to a lacking public awareness campaign.

Plus, even after this latest round of reform, Colorado still has no requirement that counties mail multilingual ballots during any statewide elections—a significant gap given that the vast majority of Coloradans vote by mail. The requirement embedded in the 2021 law only applies to the ballots used by the small percentage of Coloradans who opt to vote in person; the 2025 law doesn’t amend that requirement, only requiring multilingual ballots for those local elections that cities run on their own. 

Belknap, the Common Cause director, thinks it was not politically feasible to build into this year’s bill a broad mandate for all mail ballots to be multilingual. That, she said, would “take more conversations” in future years. 

The bill faced considerable pushback from some local governments, which argued the state overreached by compelling some localities to change their election rules, and by imposing mandates that would stretch local resources. 

Local clerks generally support the concept of expanded access, Karen Goldman, chair of the Colorado Municipal Clerks Association’s legislative committee, testified at the statehouse in February. But doing that translation, she added, “could be a considerable cost.” 

Pete Schulte, the city attorney for Aurora, testified that the bill violated “the absolute authority in our home-rule cities to govern our own municipal elections.” He predicted that some jurisdictions may bring a lawsuit against SB 1. Schutle’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether Aurora may sue over the bill. 

Some elections offices in Colorado have proactively expanded language access in ways that exceed state requirements. Several large cities or counties already provide ballots and voting information in both Spanish and English, and Denver and Boulder County mail out multilingual ballots to every registered voter. 

Advocates hope these election officials now go even further and pair existing programs with initiatives that go beyond translating documents. Jorge Hernandez called on Colorado officials to recruit more staff that speak languages other than English. 

SB1 “is great,” he said, “but my hope is that we can go above and beyond, having more [multilingual] staff in voter service centers and in county clerks’ offices.”

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In early March, Trump decreed English as the country’s official language, matching the aspirations of many on the right who’ve argued that government materials should be offered only in English. Some GOP-run states are now doubling down on that approach. 

The Iowa Supreme Court last month ruled that the secretary of state could require ballot materials to be printed in English only. Idaho is set to be the first state since 2010 to hold a vote to designate English the official state language; advocates there have fought for years to get ballot materials translated into other languages. 

But lately, other states have taken steps to increase language access. Nevada’s legislature this month passed a bill to greatly expand language access for voters. Oregon last year required that the informational pamphlets the state distributes to voters be translated into 10 different languages.

Gomez, of Mi Familia en Acción, thinks Colorado’s language accommodations stand above the other states where his organization is active, including Texas, Florida, and Arizona. “Blocking language access and the ability to understand something is just one play in the playbook to disenfranchise and disengage people,” he said. “My coworkers in different regions always point to Colorado as being a standard to work towards.”

Far beyond the matter of language access, Colorado has passed a slew of bills in recent years meant to promote democratic access for traditionally marginalized groups of voters: Last year, for example, it became the first state in the country to require all jails to establish polling places for incarcerated people. Also, state leaders are currently in talks with Native American tribes to try to establish a first-in-the-nation program to automatically register tribal members to vote.

The sponsors of those and other related bills have said their aim is to make casting a ballot easier for people who face higher obstacles to voting than the general population. Patty Hernandez said that SB 1’s new requirements around language access add to that shift.

“People want to be heard,” she said. “But they also want to be understood, and to have a little extra support.”