🗞️ Lost in Translation: How Flawed Ballots Forced a Do-Over at a Kansas Bacon Plant

When workers at a Wichita, Kansas bacon processing plant cast their ballots on December 4 and 5, 2024, the outcome remained unsettled for months. The initial tally showed 240 votes in favor of unionization and 229 against, but 79 challenged ballots were sufficient in number to affect the result, leaving the election unresolved. It was not until May 2025, after a bilateral stipulation resolved the bulk of those challenges, that a revised tally confirmed the final count: 277 in favor of joining the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2 and 266 against, among the approximately 647 eligible employees at Dold Foods LLC, a Hormel Foods subsidiary. Even then, the matter was far from over.

Dold Foods had filed objections with the National Labor Relations Board in December 2024, arguing that the agency's own regional office had made a series of procedural errors serious enough to call the result into question. The objections were pointed. On election day, every ballot was printed in English, even though a substantial portion of the eligible voters speak Spanish, Swahili, or Vietnamese as their primary language. Compounding that, the Swahili sample ballot distributed before the election was missing the translated words for "yes" and "no" above the voting boxes. The Spanish sample ballot fared little better; the document was almost entirely in English, with only the word muestra stamped on its face to signal it was meant for Spanish speakers. One week before the vote, the company had asked the regional office to provide Swahili interpreters, noting that many Swahili-speaking employees could neither read nor write the language and would need the ballot read aloud to them. The request was denied. Bilingual observers were permitted, but no translators were on hand.

The NLRB's regional director, after conducting an administrative investigation, concluded that the combination of errors was too serious to ignore. Without convening a formal hearing, she sustained the employer's objections and ordered the election thrown out. What made the ruling particularly striking was a numerical coincidence that was hard to overlook: the 11-vote margin of the union's victory was precisely equal to the number of void ballots, those rendered uncountable on election day. The regional director cited that fact explicitly, finding a "high potential for voter confusion" and ordering a rerun election for April 16, 2026.

The union pushed back, asking the full NLRB Board to reverse course. On April 16, 2026, the Board declined, in a 2 to 1 decision. The majority, pointing to the agency's longstanding obligation to maintain what it calls "laboratory conditions" for fair elections, said the regional director's judgment deserved deference. The standard, rooted in a 1948 Board ruling, General Shoe Corp., holds that elections must be conducted as nearly free from interference as possible in order to reflect the uninhibited will of employees. What distinguished this case from earlier rulings where translation deficiencies were brushed aside, the majority argued, was the convergence of failures: flawed notices, English-only ballots, and no interpreter access, all in an election decided by a handful of votes.

The lone dissenter, Member David Prouty, took a sharply different view. He argued that the Board's own case law requires evidence of actual voter confusion, not merely the prospect of it, before an election can be invalidated. The regional director had found only a likelihood or potential for confusion, a threshold Prouty said fell well short of what precedent demands. He also took aim at the procedural leap of sustaining the objections without a hearing, noting that the employer's offer of proof amounted to little more than a single vague paragraph that failed to identify any witnesses or quantify how many workers had actually been affected. In his view, the union's victory should have been certified.

The case highlights an area of federal labor law where no uniform national standard exists. The NLRB has never required multilingual ballots as a matter of policy, leaving those decisions to the discretion of regional directors on a case-by-case basis. The Dold Foods proceedings illustrate how that flexibility can become a source of legal dispute, particularly in workplaces where the workforce speaks multiple languages and where the procedural choices made before an election can determine whether its result stands.

Key Points

• Workers at Dold Foods, a Hormel Foods subsidiary, voted 277 to 266 for UFCW Local 2 representation in a December 2024 election involving approximately 647 eligible employees speaking English, Spanish, Swahili, and Vietnamese. The final tally was not confirmed until May 2025, after 77 challenged ballots were resolved by stipulation.
• The NLRB regional office provided English-only ballots on election day despite the parties having requested multilingual materials; both the Swahili and Spanish sample ballots in pre-election notices were materially incomplete.
• The regional director sustained the employer's objections and ordered a rerun election, citing a "high potential for voter confusion," and did so without convening a hearing.
• The 11 void ballots, which matched the union's margin of victory exactly, figured prominently in the regional director's analysis and in the Board majority's decision.
• The NLRB Board denied the union's request for review on April 16, 2026, deferring to the finding that "laboratory conditions" for a fair election had been destroyed.
• The dissent argued the correct legal standard requires actual evidence of voter confusion and that the employer's offer of proof was too conclusory to clear even the threshold for a hearing.
• The NLRB has no uniform national policy requiring multilingual ballots; translation decisions are delegated to regional directors on a case-by-case basis, a framework the Dold Foods proceedings have brought under scrutiny.
• A rerun election was scheduled for April 16, 2026.

Primary Source Author: Chairman James R. Murphy, Member Scott A. Mayer, and Member David M. Prouty (dissenting), National Labor Relations Board

Primary Source: Dold Foods, LLC and United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 2, 374 NLRB No. 97 (April 16, 2026)

Primary Source Link: NLRB Case 14-RC-353703

Supplemental Links

• NLRB: How Elections Are Conducted
• NLRB Election Procedures
• UFCW Local 2: Dold Foods Union Campaign Page
• Dold Foods Workers File for Union Election, Meat+Poultry
• Union Win at Dold Foods, Jacobin
• Hormel Foods: Dold Foods Facility Overview
• The NLRB's "Laboratory Conditions" Doctrine, Federalist Society
• NLRB Language Accessibility Initiative