Harris County, Texas

In Harris County, Texas, which encompasses Houston, the Vietnamese population made up 1.7% of the total county population in both the 1990 and 2000 Census. There had never been a Vietnamese legislator in Harris County. Under the 2002 determinations, Harris County is required under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act to provide bilingual assistance to Spanish and Vietnamese speaking voters. Thus, the county is required to provide all election information it provides in English, also in Spanish and Vietnamese, including ballots, sample ballots, registration information, and the like. They are also required to ensure that there are adequate bilingual poll workers to meet the needs of the language minority communities. In 2003, Harris County election officials failed to comply with Section 203 by not providing Vietnamese ballots on its electronic voting machines. The county attempted to fix this first noncompliance problem by creating paper ballot templates in Vietnamese, but these were not made available to voters at polling sites. Thus, no bilingual assistance was made available to the Vietnamese voters in Harris County for the 2003 election. Pressure by the Asian American Legal Center of Texas, a local community-based organization, the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, and the Department of Justice resulted in an agreement whereby the County agreed to ensure compliance with Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, including a full-time employee to coordinate the Vietnamese election program for all elections within the County; establishment of an advisory group to assist and participate in the Vietnamese language program; and requirement in most cases of a bilingual poll worker where a polling place has more than 50 Vietnamese-surnamed registered voters at the time of an election. In the wake of these changes, the November 2004 election saw the first and only Vietnamese candidate, Hubert Vo, win a legislative seat in Harris County.