A quarter of Philadelphians don’t speak English at home. Has the mayoral race engaged them?

Philadelphia’s mayoral candidates have been relentless these past few months with their campaigning and outreach efforts. But with the primary a little more than a month away, some have asked: how effectively have non-English native speakers been engaged with during the mayoral race?

Philadelphia has 350,000 residents who speak a language other than English at home, according to census data, and about 170,000 of them speak English “less than very well.” The vast majority of the latter are Spanish speakers, but Chinese and Vietnamese are also top languages spoken in Philadelphia households.

“Even if you know enough English to get through the barriers of becoming a citizen, and then enough English to get through the barriers of becoming a voter, that doesn’t mean that you have the English language capacity to know fairly complex things like our political system,” said Mohan Seshadri, executive director of the political organization Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (APIPA).

That impacts everything from campaign literature to political advertisements to candidate forums.

For example, there have been 47 community events regarding the mayoral race (including candidate forums) held in partnership with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s Every Voice Every Vote project to date. Thirteen of those events included languages other than English, according to a Lenfest spokesperson, with the most — six — including Spanish. Other languages that have been represented are Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian, Khmer, Cantonese and Korean. Lenfest said the two primary approaches they’ve seen at these events were live transcription or captioning in a different language, or a live interpreter who speaks a language other than English.

As for the candidates’ own communication strategies, of the mayoral candidates with websites, Maria Quiñones Sánchez is the only one who offers her campaign website in languages other than English (Spanish, Chinese and Arabic). Quiñones Sánchez has also distinguished herself in the race with Spanish TV commercials.

“We need more language access, because we’re going to have greater turnout if you do it.”

“I’m not shocked that that’s the case,” Seshadri said of the lower number of events with language access. “For so long, the Philadelphia and broader civic infrastructure has always so heavily leaned on community organizations to bear the brunt — in terms of labor, in terms of cost, in terms of advocating for it in the first place — to do all of the language access work, rather than necessarily doing it themselves.”

There are plenty of challenges when it comes to providing language access, ranging from logistics to costs of providing interpreters and equipment. At the end of the day, many candidates are faced with conducting the cost-benefit analysis of investing money and time into language access.

“If you’re running for office and you have a limited amount of resources to spend, you will send information to who you think is going to come out and vote based upon their record,” said Andy Toy, policy director at the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations. “It’s a real bad catch-22 sort of cycle, because people get less information when they’re not super voters, but if you get more information, you’re more likely to vote.”

For example, when Toy was working at the immigration organization SEAMAAC, there were a few elections where they translated materials to Vietnamese and Chinese. After the election, Toy and his colleagues found that those who received translated materials came out to vote at a higher rate than the rest of the city as a whole.

“There was a difference in voter turnout based upon, we think, that piece of literature,” Toy said. “That’s what I use as an argument to the city commissioners. We need more language access, because we’re going to have greater turnout if you do it.”

Ultimately, however, community organizers stress that cost-benefit analysis aside, language access should be widely available across the board for the sole reason that all voters in our democracy have the right to be heard.

“Language access is a human right.”

“Language access is a human right,” said Wei Chen, civic engagement director of Asian Americans United. “It’s one of the things that the candidates … need to recognize as an issue and take immediate action to show people the importance of language access.”

Will González, executive director of the Latino nonprofit Ceiba, pointed to a few candidate forums with language access that have already taken place or are scheduled in the future, saying it’s “never enough, but the efforts are being made.”

His more salient concern with this election is voting access for folks who are not English proficient.

“To me, now the fight is, when you have mail-in ballot drop boxes that are not within the community that has our largest number of [low-English proficiency] people, what the hell is going on,” González said. “It’s a self-fulfilling situation.”