said the Rodeo Drive resident. “I have friends up and down the street that are Persian and the kids all speak English perfectly.”
Pope said it was his decision to change the ballot as just another service.
“We don’t want to disenfranchise any segment of the community,” Pope said.
Nobody expected a backlash, he said. Pope said he believed some residents were shocked by seeing a Middle Eastern script on the cover of the ballot, especially at a time when the Iraq war has raised the profile of that tense region.
The city previously had separate ballots available in English, Persian and Spanish. In 2005, the candidate statements and voter instructions in the sample ballot were printed in both English and Persian on separate pages, while the cover was English-only.
Fewer than 50 people requested Persian ballots that year.
However, the city’s ballot supplier and an election consultant said “you really should-n’t pick and choose what portions you translate,” Pope said. “If you’re going to translate, you really should translate everything.”
However, City Council member Jimmy Delshad, an immigrant from Iran, said that the all-in-one ballot might have been a mistake.
“It’s possible that this ballot has gone overboard,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “We want to reach out to others, but at the same time make it one unified community. To the extent that it might be divisive, I don’t like it.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 26, 2007. Read the original PDF.