Spanish translators were missing at two Queens polling places that City Limits visited Tuesday morning, while interpreters for other languages said they had interacted with very few voters. 

A slow day at the polls Tuesday was nevertheless affected by a familiar problem: a lack of interpreters to assist non-English speakers at some sites.

Spanish translators were missing at two of three Queens polling places that City Limits visited Tuesday morning, while interpreters for other languages said they had interacted with very few voters.

Michael Gilmore, voting site coordinator at P.S. 220 in Forest Hills, said the polling place was short-staffed Tuesday, but voter turn-out was also especially low. Just 44 people had shown up to cast their ballots by 11 a.m.—five hours after polls opened—for an average of one voter about every seven minutes.

“If we get 200 voters today, I’ll be happy,” Gilmore said.

A scheduled Spanish language interpreter did not report to the site, but a poll worker who understood the language was able to help voters, he said.

In addition to the Board of Elections translators at these voting places, there were interpreters hired through the Poll Site Language Assistance Program of the NYC’s Civic Engagement Commission (NYCEC), assigned to locations with large concentrations of non-English speakers. That applies to most of New York City.

The City Planning Commission estimates that about half of New York City residents speak a language other than English at home, while a quarter of all New Yorkers are not proficient in English. Linguistic barriers can be a problem at the polls without sufficient interpretation services.

Language and identity can also inform how voters choose their candidates. Hugo Gaitán, a Spanish-speaking registered Democrat, said he chose candidates based on their last name.

“I voted for all Democrats who had a Latino name,” he said in Spanish, before recalling his favorite former elected official, late-State Sen. José Peralta.

“I have Peralta in glory,” he said of the Queens Democrat who died in 2018. This time around, he said he was voting for Assembly candidate Hiram Monserrate, a former state senator and councilmember who was convicted of a domestic-violence related charge, expelled from the legislature in 2010 and convicted in 2012 of steering council funds into his senate campaign.

“I believe in second chances,” Gaitán said.

The race for governor posed a problem for his system, however. There were no Latinos on the ballot and he said he did not remember who he voted for.

Four other interpreters at the site, two who spoke Chinese and two Hindi, said they had a morning like no other: nearly deserted. The two Chinese interpreters, each with more than a decade of experience, said they had helped seven people.

Less than a mile away at P.S. 175-Lynn Gross Discovery School in Rego Park, the Spanish interpreter was also a no-show. The other three interpreters, two for Chinese and one for Hindi, said they had not seen much action in the morning.

Russian interpreters designated specifically for that voting site as part of the Poll Site Language Assistance Program sat in the back of the room and said they had not engaged with a single person on Tuesday morning. By 10 a.m., just 34 people had cast their ballots at the school.

Blocks away at P.S. 206-Horace Harding School, located across the Long Island Expressway from LeFrak City, just 28 people had voted by 9:30 am. Several minutes would pass between voters, only one of whom had sought assistance from a Spanish interpreter.

Four other interpreters who spoke Hindi, Korean and Chinese sat and waited.

While their skills may have been underused on Tuesday—the first of two primaries planned for New York this summer, thanks to redistricting changes that pushed the contests for State Senate and U.S. Congress to August—a new state law passed earlier this month will provide more language interpreters in future elections.

The John R. Lewis NY Voting Rights Act will, among other things, lower the threshold for which local boards of elections throughout the state are required to provide interpretation services for certain “language minority groups”—American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Native or voters of Spanish heritage—if voters of a given language make up more than 2 percent of a jurisdiction’s voters, or more than 4,000 voters.

That expanded language assistance is required to go into effect within the next three years, according to the text of the legislation, which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law on June 20th.

Shell warns the move could worsen the current energy crisis

The CEO of energy major Shell, Ben van Beurden, has raised doubts about plans by the Group of Seven (G7) leading Western nations to impose a price cap on Russian oil to limit Moscow’s revenue from sales.

“You can see all the flaws already,” he told Bloomberg on Wednesday, noting that the system would work only if there were broad participation beyond Europe and the US.
 
Otherwise, “you will continue to just see what is currently happening, which is Russian crude will go to countries that are perfectly OK to still purchase Urals [Russia’s main crude export grade], for instance,” he explained.
 
According to Van Beurden, the world is heading for a “turbulent period” as tightening supplies of liquefied natural gas and oil exacerbate a global energy crunch.
 
The Shell CEO explained it would be hard to replace large swaths of Russian oil and gas that still flow into Western Europe. “There will be more LNG supply coming into Europe, but will there be a lot of extra new LNG supply to plug the gap? I don’t think so,” Van Beurden said.

He also pointed out that spare capacity from OPEC was lower than most believed or hoped, adding: “We’ll face tight markets unless there’s very significant fallout in demand.”

READ MORE: Anti-Russia alliance explores oil options

This week, the G7 economies reportedly agreed to explore the feasibility of a price cap on Russian oil exports.
 
The idea was first introduced by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen earlier this year, and was then taken up by the G7, which is considering the possibility of an embargo on the transportation of Russian seaborne crude oil unless it is purchased at or below a price to be agreed with international partners.

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT’s business section

Hours after a White House aide told Congress that Rudy Giuliani sought a presidential pardon for trying to topple American democracy, the ex-mayor—who denied that accusation—greeted a coterie of well-wishers inside a Manhattan Republican club following his son’s concession speech in the gubernatorial primary.

Guardian Angels in red berets ran security for Trump acolytes in red MAGA caps. Curtis Sliwa posed for photos in front of a step and repeat with Peggy Lee blaring from the sound system. And hours after a White House aide told Congress that Rudy Giuliani sought a presidential pardon for trying to topple American democracy, the ex-mayor—who denied that accusation—greeted a coterie of well-wishers inside a Manhattan Republican club. Some even touched his wounded back.

Good cheer permeated the primary night party for Andrew Giuliani, a Republican candidate for governor, well after the results showed him trailing Rep. Lee Zeldin by about 20 percentage points statewide. When the younger Giuliani took the microphone around 10:45 p.m. to concede defeat, he predicted a spate of GOP victories across New York and pledged to back Zeldin in the November general election.

“I’m happy to do whatever I can behind the scenes, publicly, to make sure that this is a big Red Wave,” said Giuliani, who won a plurality of the GOP vote in New York City. “And this Red Wave nationally comes right into the state of New York.”

The everyday Republicans who sipped drinks from a cash bar or sat at tables in a second-floor banquet hall howled along with the VIPs, who had been dining a few floors up inside 3 West Club in Midtown, home of the Women’s National Republican Club. Photos of past presidents lined a stairway, along with paintings of elephants.

It was a relatively big tent.

Libertarians who privately blasted the Supreme Court decision to overturn abortion rights but refused to go on the record mingled with Christian college students who said Giuliani was the “America First” candidate best representing their deep conservative religious values. A former Democrat who said he was turned off by what he considered the party’s leftward drift discussed the merits of Mitchell Lama housing. A guy handed out weed gummies from a messenger bag.

Carlos Gemal, a college student from Maspeth, said he backed Giuliani because he thought he could follow in his father’s footsteps and impose stricter “broken windows policing” to curb crime.

“If he does half the stuff his father did in New York City, he will be successful,” Gemal said.

For Chris Squassi, a wealth manager living on the Upper East Side, the decision to support Giuliani in the four-candidate GOP field also came down to “bloodline.”

“Rudy took New York City [and] he saved New York,” Squassi said.

Recent Supreme Court decisions striking down New York’s gun restrictions and eliminating the last remnants of nationwide abortion protections motivated several voters who spoke with City Limits at the polls Tuesday. But Squassi said those issues will matter little come the Nov. 8 general election.

“That’s a long time away and people are going to forget about it,” he said. “What people care about right now is filling up the tank, going to the grocery store and paying their electric bill.”

In that race, Zeldin, now the Republican nominee, faces off against Gov. Kathy Hochul after the incumbent pulled off an easy win in the Democratic primary Tuesday. It’s an uphill climb for the GOP in heavily-Democratic New York, even amid economic malaise, but ex-Dem Mike Muñoz said his new party can pull off an upset.

Muñoz, an Army veteran who helps other former military members apply for Mitchell Lama housing, said he decided to switch parties after a friend invited him to a meeting of the New York Young Republicans and he felt welcomed “with open arms.”

“I was already a moderate and I don’t like being attacked,” he said of his old party.

He said he disagreed with the Supreme Court decision to strike Roe v Wade, but said differences of opinion were OK among the Republicans he has  joined.

“The majority of people vote for safety and their wallet,” he said.

Still, representatives of the party’s nationalist bent were also out in force, illustrating the affinity for Trumpian politics that Guiliani attempted to harness.

Queens Councilmember Vickie Paladino walked through the venue in a tie-dye dress talking with voters. Young Republican Club President Gavin Wax, who last week defended racist Congressional candidate Carl Paladino in a Newsmax op-ed, stood near Giuliani at the podium. A man in an InfoWars t-shirt with Thomas Jefferson’s “blood of tyrants” quote waited to meet the losing candidate.

And as the election results began to roll in, someone changed the televisions from NY1 to Fox News, where host Laura Ingraham held court before a rapper briefly warmed up the crowd with a call back to the pre-insurrection 2020 election.

“That’s why they’re pushing vote-by-mail, and letting high-profile criminals out of jail,” he rapped over a recorded track. “Trump 2020, say it loud. I wear a MAGA hat and I do it proud.”