Representative image.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

More than 200 languages are spoken in New York, according to the Department of City Planning, backing the claim of it being the melting pot of America. However, the ballot papers in the U.S. presidential elections will have only four other languages apart from English.

And guess what? Bengali represents the Indian languages in this list.

The U.S. will on Tuesday (November 5, 2024) vote to elect its 47th President.

“We are required to service four other languages besides English. It is Chinese, Spanish, Korean and Bengali as the Asian languages,” says Micheal J Ryan, Executive Director, Board of Elections, NYC.

Subhshesh, who works as a sales agent in a store in Times Square, has Bengali roots. He is happy that his father living in the Queens area will get linguistic assistance when he goes to cast his vote.

“People like me know English but there are many in our community who are comfortable in the native language. This helps them at the polling station. I am sure my father will like the idea of seeing a Bengali language ballot paper,” says Subhshesh.

The inclusion of Bengali on ballot papers is not just a courtesy but a legal requirement.

By law, New York City is obligated to provide voting materials in Bengali at certain poll sites. This mandate extends beyond just ballot papers to include other essential voting materials, ensuring comprehensive language support for Bengali-speaking voters.

Mr. Ryan explains the reason why Bengali is among the list of languages the Board of Elections serves.

“There was a lawsuit about language access and as you know the country of India has a lot of different languages within it. The settlement of that lawsuit required within a certain population density to have an Asian Indian language. Then through some negotiations, they settled on Bengali. I understand the limitations of Bengali being the choice but it came out of a lawsuit. ” The first time the South Asian community in the Queen’s locality of New York found ballots translated into Bengali was in 2013.

The addition of Bengali-language ballots came nearly two years after the federal government ordered the city to provide language assistance to South Asian minorities under a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Bengali-speaking population includes people coming from Asian countries like India and Bangladesh. While it does not represent the whole gamut of languages spoken in the region, the inclusion of this language is expected to have a significant impact on voter participation within the Bengali-speaking community.

Dr Avinash Gupta, President, of the Federation of Indian Association says it helps the Indian community.

“It will help the Indian population to go out and vote. That is how we can get our voices heard. We are a sizable population. It is heartening to see how Indians go out and vote and even contest elections”, says Dr Avinash Gupta.

While Ronald Reagan, left, had pledged to leave office if he became ‘impaired’, President Biden affirmed that he is ‘racing to the end’.
| Photo Credit: AP

The age question for presidential candidates in the U.S. is more than four decades old. President Ronald Reagan in 1980 answered it with a pledge to resign if he became impaired, and in 1984 with a clever joke that reset his campaign from a stumbling debate performance to a 49-State landslide and a second term.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said to the question he knew was coming in perhaps the most famous mic-drop moment in campaign history. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The audience roared, even Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale laughed — and Reagan’s reelection was back on track.

Today, Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, is struggling for such a redemptive moment after a disastrous debate performance against Republican former President Donald Trump, 78. Those 90 minutes last week set off alarms among Democrats hoping Mr. Biden would keep Mr. Trump from returning to the White House — and heightened concern among voters long skeptical of how either elderly man would govern a complex nation of more than 330 million people for four more years.

More than two dozen people who have spent time with the President privately described him as often sharp and focused. But he also has moments, particularly later in the evening, when his thoughts seem jumbled and he trails off mid-sentence or seems confused, they said. Sometimes he doesn’t grasp the finer points of policy details. He occasionally forgets people’s names, stares blankly and moves slowly around the room, they said.

Mr. Biden has vowed to stay in the race, despite signs of eroding support on Capitol Hill.

“I am running … no one’s pushing me out,” Mr. Biden said on a on call Wednesday with staffers from his reelection campaign. “I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”

But the question facing him is far more intimate, according to one expert who covered Reagan’s health during his presidency. “The most important debate of the campaign is the one taking place right now in Biden’s head between the part of mind telling him he’s the chosen one, and the more self-aware part,” said Rich Jaroslavsky of the University of California Berkeley, formerly of the Wall Street Journal.

At its heart, the question — how old is too old to be President? — is about competence. And Americans have never had wider personal experience with the effects of aging than they do today.

A surge of retiring baby boomers means that millions more Americans know when they see someone declining. For many, this widespread experience made Mr. Biden’s halting performance during Thursday’s debate a familiar reality check.

Mr. Trump seemed more vigorous, even though he lied about or misstated a long list of facts. When he challenged Mr. Biden to a cognitive test, Mr. Trump flubbed the name of the doctor who had administered his.

“Is this an episode, or is this a condition?” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 84, wondered on MSNBC, reflecting the question dominating Democratic circles this week. “It’s legitimate — of both candidates.”

Reagan faced the same questions even before he was elected as the oldest President to that point.

That didn’t happen. Reagan served two full terms, leaving office in 1989.

Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Biden has made a similar pledge, and their campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.