Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act covers localities that meet two criteria:

• More than 10,000 or over 5% of voting-age citizens in state, county or municipality must be “members of a single language minority group,” and have limited English proficiency. For example, Hispanics with limited English proficiency are 5.8% of California’s population. That means all elections in the state must include ballots and election information in Spanish, even if an individual county or city doesn’t meet that population threshold.
• The language minority must have depressed literacy rates. Depressed literacy rates are based on whether the share of the language minority’s voting age citizens with a fifth-grade education is less than the national share.

These determinations are made with Census data for Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Asian race and ethnicity groups.

But this process excludes some communities with limited English skills. For example, immigrants from North Africa who primarily speak Arabic (and are marked white on the Census) or immigrants from Haiti who primarily speak Creole (marked African American on the Census) would not be covered under Section 203. The Census Bureau is actively researching the inclusion of “Middle Eastern or North African” as a separate racial response category, but the official Standards of Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity have not been revised since 1997.

Spanish is the most covered language under section 203. Three states and 194 other counties in the US require ballots to be provided in Spanish. The next most common languages provided throughout the US are Chinese, Vietnamese, Navajo, Choctaw, and Filipino. Twenty states and Washington, DC do not have any localities that are required to provide non-English voting materials.