“For far too long, thousands of Russian-Americans in our city have been shut out of the voting process unfairly because of the language barrier,” said Sen. Carl Kruger, who sponsored the bill in the Senate and that was introduced in the Assembly by Assemblyman Bill Colton. “Voting and registration materials are printed in many languages other than English, but Russian has long been ignored. In an infuriating Catch-22, these New Yorkers aren’t voting because they aren’t registered -- and they aren’t registered because they can’t read the materials in English to do so.”

Voting materials are already translated into Spanish, Chinese and Korean, yet, according to U.S. Census figures, Russian is currently the third most widely spoken foreign language in New York City, after Spanish and Chinese.