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In another sign of booming Latino growth, the federal government ordered Salt Lake County on Wednesday to start providing ballots, voter information and voting assistance in Spanish.
The U.S. Census Bureau said the county is one of 248 political jurisdictions in 25 states where a language minority that does not speak English well is large enough to require language assistance under the federal Voting Rights Act.
San Juan County is the only other Utah jurisdiction listed. It is required to provide assistance in Navajo and has had to do so for years.
But the mandate for Utah's most populous county to provide assistance for Spanish speakers is new.
The Voting Rights Act requires such assistance if more than 10,000 voting-age citizens — or 5 percent of all local voting-age citizens — belong to a language minority group and speak English less than "very well," as determined by the American Community Survey. Also, that minority group must have a higher rate of people with less than a fifth-grade education than the national average.
Those calculations use only U.S. citizens and not undocumented immigrants.
While the precise numbers used in the calculations by the Census Bureau were not made available, American Community Survey data for 2005-09 showed that Salt Lake County had 133,440 Latinos older than age 5, and 49,656 — or 37.2 percent — reported speaking English worse than "very well."
The data for San Juan County showed about 44 percent of its residents speak Navajo. The survey said that about 1,600 of them — or about 12 percent of the county's total population — speak English worse than "very well."
"We're not surprised. We sort of expected that" finding, said Scott Konopasek, elections director for the Salt Lake County Clerk's Office. "That means we need to provide ballots in Spanish, voter information in Spanish and voter registration in that language as well. ... We will need to find some poll workers who speak Spanish or are bilingual. We have had some preliminary discussions about it. Now we will begin that planning process."
Salt Lake County clerk Sherrie Swensen said the county must provide that assistance starting with next year's June primary election.
"This will be an extra expense," she said, "but we don't know how much it will cost yet."
Archie Archuleta, president of the Coalition of La Raza in Utah, praised the move and said it may boost Latino voter turnout.
"It makes the voting process more friendly," he said. "We and other Latino groups will use this to tell people to get out and vote, and that they can't use the excuse of language not to vote anymore. With the increase in Latino population, this is an important step."
Konopasek said he has worked in places in California that had similar requirements, and experience shows the county will also need to launch some public relations work to help pacify and educate "people who become upset when they see ballots offered in Spanish."
Swensen said the county will try to make clear it is a federal requirement, "and we have no choice but to comply."
Another question is whether the new action will also require the state to provide Spanish or bilingual materials for voter-information brochures it provides within Salt Lake County.
Mark Thomas, elections director for Lt. Gov. Greg Bell, said he is researching that question. But he adds that the state has never been required to provide such materials in Navajo in the years that San Juan County has been providing Navajo assistance.
The 2010 Census reported that the overall Latino population in Salt Lake County was 176,015, or 17.1 percent of the population. That was up from 106,786 Latinos in the county in 2000, when they accounted for 11.9 percent of the population.
That means the county's Latino population swelled by 65 percent during the past decade while the overall population grew by about 15 percent.
The Census Bureau reported that 3.1 percent of political jurisdictions nationally will be required to provide language assistance in elections. However, those few jurisdictions cover 33.8 percent of the nation's population.