Center for Civic Design

Broward County would have been better off doing three separate ballot styles. One each in English,Spanish, and Creole. Cramming 3 languages onto one already monster ballot was a recipe for disaster.

Maybe not an issue here, but I understood that DOJ prefers one multi-language ballot over separate 1-language ballots, because voters don’t need to jump through extra hoop of declaring language preference, at least for VBM voters in pre-clearance states. May not be true now tho.

Is this an enforceable law or is it a preference?

There are a few issues. First, so you can’t later identify voters’ ballots by the language they used. Second, bilingual voters check across two languages for meaning, especially on ballot questions. Also, we know that voters are unlikely to ask for in-language ballots.