South Asians in Queens to Get Ballots in Bengali When New York voters go to the polls for the primary on Sept. 10, South Asians in Queens will for the first time find ballots translated into Bengali, the first new language to be introduced at city polling booths in more than a decade, election officials said. The addition of Bengali-language ballots at 60 polling sites in Queens comes 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 federal government had previously ordered the city's English ballots to be translated into Spanish, and more recently Chinese, in 1993, and Korean, in 2001. The delay in the appearance of Bengali ballots prompted advocates for South Asian voters to sue the city's Board of Elections on Tuesday over what they called its repeated failure to provide adequate language assistance in elections until now. "The Board's bureaucratic foot-dragging has prevented many Bengali-speaking Americans with limited English proficiency from being able to fully exercise their right to vote," said Seema Agnani, executive director of the Chhaya Community Development Corporation, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The Supreme Court last week struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that has forced New York to seek federal approval for any proposed electoral change since the early 1970s. But other provisions of the act, which remain intact, continue to require the city to provide bilingual assistance. City election officials have said the ruling, which helps the city move ahead with a contentious plan to redeploy old lever voting machines in the primary, would not delay their plan to roll out Bengali ballots. The lawsuit against the elections board, which was filed in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, said that the board failed to provide Bengali ballots for the November 2012 election despite assurances to community groups. The lawsuit also said that the board had supplied too few interpreters at some polling sites, and in some cases failed to properly identify them, so that they ended up sitting in front of signs for Chinese interpreters. Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the Board of Elections, whose 10 members are approved by the City Council, said the board had always intended to meet its obligations under the voting act. She said the board had previously told advocates that the Bengali ballots would not be ready until the vendor that produced the ballots made technical adjustments to its software. In the meantime, she added, the city had taken other steps to assist South Asian voters in recent elections, which included distributing handouts with the names of candidates translated into Bengali; providing interpreters in Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi at select polling sites; and advertising coming elections in a Bengali-language newspaper. The government ordered the city to provide language assistance to South Asian minorities in October 2011, after census officials determined that those minorities had surpassed a threshold of voting-age citizens in Queens jurisdictions, had low literacy rates and did not speak English well. A working group that included city officials and community groups then determined that ballots should be translated into Bengali at specific polling sites and that other language assistance should be offered, Ms. Vazquez said. Glenn D. Magpantay, a program director at the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the lawyers involved in the suit, said that the board's efforts so far had been inadequate and that there was no guarantee that the Bengali ballots would be available in September. The lawsuit claims that the result has been the disenfranchisement of South Asian voters, which has forced advocacy groups to expend their own limited resources to provide language assistance to voters. Mr. Magpantay said he hoped a court would compel the city to enact a comprehensive plan for helping South Asians in the same way it provides assistance for Chinese and Korean voters.