“It’s a great triumph for the Hispanic community” is how some described the agreement reached by the Department of Justice and Suffolk County civil servants to recognize the rights for Spanish-speaking voters to speak Spanish in the county.

Under the terms of the agreement, the county has committed to translating the electoral materials into Spanish, to train the personnel at the voting centers to offer assistance to Hispanic voters, in addition to investigating and replacing the employees with hostile attitudes toward Latino voters.

“After a 14-year struggle, it is done; finally the rights of Hispanics to vote are recognized,” said Patrick Young, director of the Central American Refugee Center, a nonprofit immigration and human rights group, one of the organizations that worked on this initiative.

In accordance with the Voters Rights Act, designed to eliminate language barriers in the electoral process, a county must provide translation services if there are more than 10,000 potential voters in the area. Suffolk was obliged to provide these services since 1992, when the census revealed that there were over 10,000 potential voters who did not speak or understand English well enough to partake in the electoral process.

Lynne Bizzarro, chief deputy county attorney of Suffolk County, said the agreement is the result of negotiations that have taken place since the summer of 2002 and that the county is complying with the terms of the agreement even before it was signed by authorities from the county and the Department of Justice.

Activists who took part in demonstrations in favor of this agreement indicated that one of the major problems that Latinos face when it’s time to vote, is that those in charge of the voting booths treat them poorly because of the language barrier. According to the agreement, where there are 101 or more voters who are properly registered, the county must hire at least one bilingual worker.