The Board of Elections discriminates against minority voters, an Asian-American group charged in a lawsuit filed against the city yesterday.

The suit alleges Chinese and Korean immigrants in New York City have been denied bilingual or interpretive services they are legally due, a violation of federal law. The suit was filed in federal court on behalf of four Asian advocacy groups and five immigrant voters by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and a pro bono co-counsel, Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP.

The city is charged with violating the Language Assistance Provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, requiring jurisdiction to provide language assistance if it contains more than 10,000 citizens of voting age who are members of a single language minority and have limited English ability.

Thus, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens are required to provide Chinese election forms and instructions and Queens is required to furnish such services in Korean, the group claims. The complaint alleges the Board of Elections has failed to comply with the law despite nearly a decade of efforts to compel it do so by community organizations in the form of letters, meetings, public hearings, and telephone calls. Alleged violations include faulty transliteration of candidates’ names; names printed too small to be legible; translated materials hidden or unavailable to workers, and verbal discrimination at polling sites.

“Forty years since the historic Voting Rights Act, minority voters in New York are still fighting for their right to vote,” a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Glenn Magpantay, said. “Instead of comprehensive compliance and reforms under the Voting Rights Act, the Board of Elections has responded with isolated Band-Aid fixes.”

In a statement, the senior counsel of the New York City Law Department’s general litigation division, Stephen Kitzinger, defended the Board of Elections, saying it has “a comprehensive language assistance program. It will continue working with all interested parties to enhance its program.” He said the law department just received the legal papers and is evaluating them.

Mr. Magpantay said the alleged lack of voting materials deters immigrants from going to the polls or choosing their intended candidates. A 2004 exit poll of more than 7,000 New York City Asian-American voters, conducted by AALDEF, identified 46% as limited English proficient, with Chinese Americans (56%) and Korean Americans (65%) significantly higher.

When translation or interpretation services are available, the plaintiffs said, it is often in incorrect areas, such as Washington Heights rather than Chinatown in Manhattan, or in the wrong language. Don Shin, a program associate at the Queens-based Young Korean American Service and Education Center, a plaintiff organization in the case, said that more than 120 members called in 2005 because of a lack of translation services.

The plaintiffs acknowledge that while the application of the Voting Rights Act has a long way to go, there have been victories. The executive director of AALDEF, Margaret Fung, testified before Congress in October 2005 that bilingual voting forms have resulted in the enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of Asian Americans across the country.

In 1992, when the voting rights law was expanded so that large concentrations of Asian Americans in New York were included, New York had no Asian-American elected officials, she noted. That changed in 2001 with the election of John Liu to the City Council, followed by Jimmy Meng to the state Assembly in 2004.

Yesterday she focused on what she said were the shortcomings of the city’s implementations of the law. “For over a decade, the board’s erratic attempts at compliance with the Voting Rights Act have disenfranchised too many Asian-American voters,” she said. “This must end immediately.”

An immigrant from China who is a voter plaintiff in the case, Fun Mae Chin Eng, said she had not missed an election since she became a citizen in 1986, but she is certain other Chinese immigrants did not vote because they were “intimidated.”

A garment worker, Ms. Eng, 73, has never learned English. “I want to learn English, but I have no time,” she said through a translator in Cantonese. “I am old, I did not go to school in the United States.”

To vote, she had to develop a strategy. “When I got into the machine it was like I was blind,” she said. Even though there are often translated ballots available these days, she said, when she goes to vote she brings a cutout of her chosen candidate’s name written in English. Due to erratic translation services, she said, other voters “won’t know where to go, what to do, how to go about it.”