Chicago now offers ballots in 12 languages, a shift Illinois GOP Chairman Bob Grogan says makes elections harder to monitor and looks like virtue signaling.
Voters across Chicago can cast ballots in English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog, Polish, Gujarati, Urdu, Ukrainian, Arabic and Russian, Fox News Digital reported.
Illinois Republican Party Chairman Bob Grogan warned that the sprawl of languages makes an already complicated election system harder for party observers and election judges to watch independently.
Grogan, a former DuPage County auditor, framed the expansion as more politics than practical need.
"It's a solution in search of a problem."
He added another blunt assessment of the city's approach.
"It's big city virtue signaling."
Chicago Board of Elections data from the March primary shows how little some of those options were used.
Citywide, 424,564 ballots were cast. Multilingual ballots totaled 7,857, about 1.85% of the vote.
English-Polish ballots led the non-English options at 4,474. English-Chinese ballots hit 2,183. English-Hindi reached 664. English-Korean came in at 352. English-Tagalog totaled 100.
The smaller languages barely registered. English-Gujarati ballots: 9. English-Urdu: 15. English-Arabic: 10. English-Russian: 25. English-Ukrainian: 25.
Grogan zeroed in on Gujarati in particular. He noted the language comes from India, where English is an official language, and said he has "a fair number of Gujarati friends... and everyone in their family speaks English."
"Gujarati, it's from India, and English is an official language in India."
He also questioned the patchwork across Illinois counties.
"You can have a Gujarati population in Peoria. You would think that there would be some more uniformity to all of that as well."
DuPage County, he noted, offers fewer language options than Chicago.
A Chicago Board of Elections spokesperson said Section 203 of the U.S. Voting Rights Act requires materials and ballots in certain precincts for Spanish, Chinese and Hindi speakers.
The board said it includes the other non-English languages to "maintain uniformity with the languages used by the Cook County Clerk's office under a county ordinance, so that all voters throughout Cook County are afforded equal voting opportunities."
The board employs in-house translation staff and multilingual media help. Voters may also bring interpreters to assist them in understanding and casting a ballot under certain conditions. The board did not respond in time on how many languages appear on mail-in ballots.
As of Thursday, 7,218 election judges had been assigned for November's general election. Of those, 810 were multilingual candidates covering Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Polish, Korean and Tagalog.
Grogan's core objection is practical oversight. Party observers and judges cannot easily check ballots they cannot read.
"I think it certainly makes it harder to monitor. If there is one ballot cast in that language, that's a very small vulnerability you have. If all of a sudden we have 10,000 in some very small, poorly understood language, then that increases the risk."
Nine Gujarati ballots in March do not match that high-volume scenario. Neither do the double-digit counts for Urdu, Arabic, Russian and Ukrainian. Polish and Chinese draw real numbers. Several of the added languages do not.
The board presents the full list as equal access and county-wide consistency. Grogan presents it as an unnecessary complication layered onto a system that already demands tight chain-of-custody and clear observation.
Election integrity rests on rules voters and observers can both follow in real time. When ballots arrive in languages few poll watchers can read, the people tasked with catching errors lose ground. Chicago chose the wider menu anyway. Taxpayers and lawful voters now live with the trade-off.
