New York town defies U.S. on Hispanic voting rights – a background story on the legal and political donnybrook.
I’m not in the habit of defending cities on the receiving end of voter discrimination lawsuits, but this seems a pretty exceptional case, and I would have to agree with the city that the Feds have better things to do than screw with the city’s governmental structure.
The issue is the election of the village Board of Trustees, all of whom are elected at-large. I assume this is a long-term state of sffairs, and not a recent development – unfortunately the article doesn’t directly address this question.
In any case, a hispanic candidate failed to get a seat in a previous election and sued, and the Justice department has taken it up.
Ultimately the city was ordered to divide itself into electoral districts to improve minorities’ chances of winning elections. They don’t want to do that.
Given the demographics, the result will probably be ethnicly lopsided districts that will pit themselves against each other.
The mayor suggested an important point. Hispanics already make up 46% of the population, and the trend is upward. Within a few years, given their population growth and an active voter registration campaign, they may be in a position to take over the whole government. Under the current system, that is: under the Federal plan the hispanic vote will be bottled up into a limited number of districts.
Could that be an unspoken reason why the Justice Department jumped into this? I dunno, I hate to be THAT cynical, but these days you can’t afford not to be.