It’s precisely because the vote of minorities was diluted that San Mateo County just switched from at-large to district elections. With at-large elections, minorities never had enough votes to elect anyone as supervisor. With district, the expection is that at least one district will have “majority minority” and so will get a minority supervisor elected to the board.
That’s what the whole lawsuit was about.
Identity politics are a disease on the body politic. Sure it takes advantage of basic human behavior and will never go away but it’s not something we should make an integral part of our electoral system. The idea that a person of a certain ethnicity or whatever can only be represented by another person of that ethnicity is a cancer. It undermines the foundational idea of our democracy: that it is voting alone that creates representation. If you vote (or chose not to) in an election then the winner is your representative. Even if they never vote the way you want them to you are represented. Even if you are white and they are black they are still your representative.
That said, obviously race is a huge factor in America and a lack of minority representatives can be a clue that something is wrong. What type of at large elections were used in San Mateo County? If they were using block voting so that the same countywide majority could elect all of the supervisors then obviously that’s going to be a lot less representative than a proportional system. In the latter you would expect parties to put up some minority candidates. If they don’t you don’t need an electoral fix; a political solution is open for a nondumbass group to appeal to minorities by putting some on the ballot.
Yes, that is the key question. To elect five at-large representatives with each voter having only a single vote (or even two votes) is to get much better minority representation than a district-based scheme. But if each voter gets five votes you’ll get much worse minority representation than a district-based scheme.
I Googled just now for the answer and wasn’t surprised to note that even after 5 or 10 clicks among the Google babble, that basic question was never answered. (Let me hijack the thread slightly to mention that, since the two forms of at-large voting are exact opposites in electoral effect, the oversight shows lamentable ignorance by journalists.)
Nevertheless, the comments (“no minority person ever elected”) make clear that it was the five-vote majority-block system.
The system was that each supervisor was elected on a different rotating basis. That is, one year supervisor from “district 1” would be up for election, the next year the supervisor from “district 2”. Except in the case of special elections for vacancies.
The effect is the same as block voting because in each election the entire population of the county has one vote for one supervisor.
Whether I agree that identity politics are “a disease” I’m not sure. But enough people thought there was a problem here to get the system changed.