Professor Connie So is featured in today's (March 27, 2024) UW Today article. This article was pulled from the Northwest Asian Weekly. Imagine it is your first time voting, your ballot arrives, but the text is too small to read and you don't recognize the names of the candidates. Such was the experience—more or less—of many older residents of the Chinatown International-District (CID). Although their ballots were translated into Chinese, the writing appeared tiny—and the candidates’ names were printed in English, a language they were blind in.
An event entitled "CID Cares" was to teach mostly first-time voters how to vote-not to tell them whom to vote for. Connie So, President of the OCA Asian Pacific Advocates of Greater Seattle, one of the groups that supported the non-partisan event, said “Overall it was a success, but there were glitches." Even with the Chinese translation, it turned out, was hard for some to read. “We didn’t realize it was necessary to blow up the writing on the ballots on a big screen. Even some who brought their glasses had a hard time reading it,” she said.
Read the full article by Mahlon Meyer from the Northwest Asian Weekly here.