Sponsors (11)
The bill trades federal protections and funding for multilingual election access and detailed legal safeguards in favor of greater state flexibility and reduced litigation risk for administrators—potentially simplifying administration for officials but increasing disenfranchisement, legal uncertainty, and local financial strain for language-minority and low-income voters.
State and local election officials face fewer federal legal constraints and lower immediate litigation risk over language-assistance categories, giving jurisdictions more administrative flexibility.
States that choose to forgo federal election funds can keep full autonomy over multilingual ballot policies without federal funding conditions.
All federally administered ballots would be in English for the fiscal year, creating a single-language standard that could simplify ballot production and uniformity for jurisdictions that use federal templates or guidance.
Voters with limited English proficiency (including many racial-ethnic minorities, immigrants, and low-income individuals) would lose access to ballots in their preferred language, increasing risks of disenfranchisement, confusion, and lower turnout.
The bill removes or overrides federal statutory protections that required language assistance (including aspects of the Voting Rights Act), reducing federal legal remedies and protections for language-minority voters.
States and localities that relied on federal election-administration funding could face cuts or loss of funds, which would reduce election resources, increase administrative burdens, and may force local cost-shifting or program cuts that affect voters (especially low-income voters).
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Conditions federal election-administration funds so States that provide non-English ballot text for federal elections are ineligible and removes certain textual protections from a Voting Rights Act subsection.
Introduced March 11, 2025 by Abraham J. Hamadeh · Last progress March 11, 2025
Prohibits federal election-administration funds to any State that, in a given fiscal year, provides ballots for federal elections containing any non-English-language text. It also removes three enumerated paragraphs from a subsection of the Voting Rights Act, narrowing certain statutory protections tied to language and voting practices. The measure conditions federal funding on English-only ballots for federal offices and alters parts of the Voting Rights Act that currently constrain some election-related restrictions, creating potential legal conflicts and reducing federally supported language access for voters with limited English proficiency.