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COURTS✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
English speakers in Quebec fight to get voter info in their language
Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
Bushwick Tarantella
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons
English-speaking rights group TALQ sued Élections Québec after the agency decided, for the first time, to mail voter information exclusively in French ahead of next month's election. Judge Sylvain Lussier faces a Wednesday deadline to rule, since production of voter cards begins the next day and any injunction risks expiring before it takes effect.
Élections Québec says it sought a language exemption and was denied, and that adding English to the reminder card alone would cost an extra $4.3 million on top of the $7.5 million already spent. Its proposed fix, a QR code linking to English information online, drew objections from advocates who note that elderly voters and those in remote areas may not have reliable internet access to use it.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
An election agency admitting a fix would help, then pricing it at several million dollars and a QR code, is the civic equivalent of handing someone directions written in a language they don't read and pointing at a phone signal that isn't there. Nobody disputes French is the official language, the fight is over whether 'official' should mean 'only.' A judge with days to decide is a strange place to land a policy question that had two years to get sorted properly.
