Does it cost a lot to provide bilingual assistance?
No. Where Section 203 is implemented properly, bilingual assistance accounts for only a small fraction of total elections costs. For example, in a 2005 study of election officials in the 31 states covered by Section 203, 39.5 percent reported that they incur no additional costs for providing language assistance. Most of the remaining responding jurisdictions reported that they incur expenses of less than 1.5 percent of their entire election budgets for oral assistance and less than 3 percent for written assistance. This study mirrored the results of General Accounting Office studies conducted in 1984 and 1997, which found minimal costs on the part of jurisdictions to provide language assistance.
