The attorneys in the Port Chester voting rights case are done talking, and now a federal judge will decide how to reform Port Chester’s village board election system. His job is to choose a system that will allow Hispanic voters to participate fully and that will fix the problems he found in his January ruling.

Judge Stephen Robinson has found that Latinos are at a big disadvantage in a system where the trustees run in village-wide races for two open seats each year. The court found that if trustees ran in separate districts, one of which had a Hispanic majority, then Latinos would have a means to gain representation in their local government.

The case is complicated and easily misunderstood. Basically, the Department of Justice proved a set of problems with the old system. The voting pattern in Port Chester has been racially polarized, and candidates supported by the entire Hispanic electorate routinely lost. There was also the matter of a racist flier in 2007 and a lack of language assistance at the voting booths. No Latino, incidentally, has won office in a village that is nearly half Hispanic.

One of the details mentioned in the final day of arguments yesterday was a bit ironic. (I didn’t have room for it in today’s Journal News article, attached below.) Cesar Ruiz, at right, the unsuccessful board candidate who sparked the case and became a plaintiff, doesn’t live within the proposed Hispanic-majority district. His attorney, Randolph McLaughlin, proposed that candidates in each new district not be subject to a residency rule.

There was also an intriguing discussion about how non-U.S. citizens figure into all this. I’ll get to that later.

(Top photo: Carucha L. Meuse/ The Journal News)

Sept. 24, 2008

Judge weighs voting plans

A federal judge will decide how to repair Port Chester’s election system in a way that gives Latinos a fair shake in local politics.

Attorneys made final arguments in U.S. District Court in White Plains yesterday in the second phase of a voting rights lawsuit brought almost two years ago by the Justice Department. U.S. District Judge Stephen C. Robinson has already agreed that the system was discriminatory and needed to change. Next he will choose whether to create six separate voting districts, including one with a Hispanic majority, or take an unorthodox approach being pushed by the village.

Port Chester has skipped two elections while fighting the case and pressing for a system called cumulative voting. Trustees would still run villagewide under that plan, as they do now, but all six would be elected the same year. Voters could use all six of their votes for the same candidate if they chose – a feature designed to let Hispanics or any other group gain a political voice.

Yesterday, the Justice Department slammed that idea as a mere theory.

“Cumulative voting is unauthorized by the law, and we have no idea whether it will work in this case,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kennedy told the judge. He described the plan as “a leap in the dark.”

The judge must choose a remedy that fixes the violations he found in January. Robinson found that even though Latinos tended to back a particular candidate, that candidate couldn’t prevail in villagewide contests for two board seats. Port Chester is nearly half Latino, but no Hispanic has been elected to office.

The village, citing the complexity of drawing and redrawing election districts, has argued for the least amount of change from the current at-large system. But, given the range of election problems found by the judge – racially polarized voting, inadequate language assistance at the polls – the situation demanded more change, not less, Kennedy said. Randolph McLaughlin, representing an unsuccessful board candidate who became a plaintiff, reminded the judge of other problems with the at-large system, including a nominating process that allowed party leaders to handpick their candidates.

The plaintiffs took on one of the village’s main arguments against election districts: that because many Latinos were noncitizens, some districts would have far fewer eligible voters than others. Kennedy said that factor had no bearing on the decision.

Attorneys differed over whether state law even permitted cumulative voting, and whether the courts had ever imposed it as a solution. Myrna Perez, an attorney representing the organization FairVote, spoke in favor of cumulative voting as a means to empower minority groups. She also pitched a similar system that allows voters to rank their chosen candidates by order of preference.

Robinson raised questions about whether Port Chester voters, particularly new voters in the Hispanic community, would have enough knowledge to strategize under such rules and gain representation on the board. The ranking system, for example, was used in New York City Board of Education elections until 2003. Kennedy and Robinson said they had voted in such elections and hadn’t been aware that they could rank in order of preference.

Anthony Piscionere, representing the village, said Port Chester would spend the resources to educate people about cumulative voting. He said Hispanic voters would be able to elect one or possibly two of their preferred candidates under the village plan.

Separate voting districts, the conventional remedy, would further divide the village, he said.

“This is not something to foist upon the village of Port Chester,” he said.