Port Chester’s June 15 village trustee election is bringing an assortment of firsts. One of them is the unprecedented diversity of candidates for Port Chester village board. I wrote today about the three Latino candidates among the 14 people running for trustee — one each on the party slates and one independent. All six seats are up for election under cumulative voting.

Befitting Port Chester — where the Latino community draws from multiple nationalities and no one group seems to predominate — the three Hispanic candidates are originally from three different countries: Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. The Andean nations are quite well represented this time around, though Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbeans also figure prominently into the population.

Data analyst Tim Henderson sent me this set of Census estimates from 2008 for Port Chester’s Latino population, broken down by region of origin.

Total Port Chester population: 27,773

Hispanic/Latino: 13,633

Mexican: 3,206, or 24 percent of Hispanics

Puerto Rican: 830, or 6 percent

Cuban: 514, or 4 percent

Dominican: 451, or 3 percent

Central American: 2,761, or 20 percent

South American: 5,618, or 41 percent

Other Hispanic/Latino: 253, or 2 percent

For more on the election click here, and check out portchestervotes.com.

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)

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As part of a lawsuit on behalf of legal, Latino immigrants in New York City, attorneys have filed a motion seeking a Sept. 22 deadline for the processing of citizenship applications that are more than six months old. Inordinate delays will otherwise prevent the immigrants from being able to vote in the November elections, say attorneys from the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been under pressure to address the pileup of paperwork that came in just before the July 30 fee increase. The agency announced yesterday that it was on course to complete naturalization applications in 13-15 months, down from earlier projections of 16-18 months. USCIS says it is hiring almost 3,000 new employees and quadrupling the funding for overtime.

USCIS and the FBI also announced an effort to deal with one of the typical holdups, the FBI “name checks.” (Name checks are required for various applications including those seeking citizenship, green cards and asylum.) USCIS is asking the FBI to prioritize 29,800 naturalization cases submitted to the FBI before May 2006 in which applicant was already interviewed, according to a press release.

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From the Associated Press report on Gov. Bill Richarson’s endorsement:

“I believe he is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime leader that can bring our nation together and restore America’s moral leadership in the world,” Richardson said in a statement. “As a presidential candidate, I know full well Sen. Obama’s unique moral ability to inspire the American people to confront our urgent challenges at home and abroad in a spirit of bipartisanship and reconciliation.”

No Hispanic has won elective office in Port Chester, despite being nearly half Latino. That fact has been oft-repeated in the voting rights case, which found that the election system discriminated against Hispanics. But the absence of Hispanic officials is technically beside the point. The Justice Department wanted to highlight this issue after my recent story about the latest development in the case.

“The issue for the Government is not Latinos winning elective office,” spokesman Herb Hadad points out. “It is that candidates supported by Latinos have never won. We have filed numerous briefs in this case that list white Italians as the preferred candidates of choice of Latinos. These candidates lose too.”

What the government needed to prove in this case was that Hispanics were politically cohesive and voted as a bloc, and that the white majority voted sufficiently as a bloc to defeat the minority’s choice. Judge Stephen Robinson wrote in his decision:

The evidence here is clear that in 12 of the 16 elections this Court views as most probative in this case, the candidates of choice of Hispanic voters in Port Chester were defeated by the candidates of choice of non-Hispanic voters.

He notes that Hispanics did see their preferred candidate win in three recent elections – Mayor Dennis Pilla’s victory in 2007 and two trustee races in 2006. But that doesn’t negate the overall trend, he wrote.

In sum, it is clear to this Court that Hispanic voters and non-Hispanic voters in Port Chester prefer different candidates, and that non-Hispanic voters generally vote as a bloc to defeat Hispanic-preferred candidates.

(For the record, only two Hispanics have ever been on the ballot for village board: Jose Santos, as a Republican, in 1992, and Cesar Ruiz, as a Democrat, in 2001. Both finished last.)

The Justice Department is proposing that Port Chester hold a special election next year for all six trustee seats. This time each trustee would represent a particular district, and one of those districts would have a Hispanic majority among eligible voters. After the special election, two trustee seats would be up for election each year.

The village is proposing to elect all six at-large trustees simultaneously through cumulative voting. Voters would be able to cast up to six votes for the same candidate.

Port Chester voters will sit out another election day tomorrow as the village continues to fight the U.S. Justice Department’s charge that its system discriminates against Hispanics. Today, the village filed a report in U.S. District Court by Clark Bensen, who has been retained as an expert witness.

Bensen’s report picks apart the government’s plan to create six new voting districts in Port Chester, each of which would each elect a trustee to the village board. Currently the board members serve at large, and that, according to the government, has prevented any Latino from winning elective office. Two Hispanic candidates ran for village board and lost, despite overwhelming support from Hispanic voters.

Bensen, founder of the company Polidata, disputes the way census data was used to draw the district boundaries. He argues, as the village has done, that the votes in each district would carry vastly different amounts of weight because some districts have large numbers of noncitizens. Votes in the proposed Hispanic-majority district would be worth two or three times the votes in other areas, Bensen’s report says.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Robinson has ruled that Port Chester’s system violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He has received proposed remedies from each side in the case – on one side the Justice Department and former candidate Cesar Ruiz, and on the other side, the village. The judge has yet to set a hearing date to determine the final remedy.

Meanwhile, Port Chester is keeping an eye on a North Carolina voting rights case headed for the U.S. Supreme Court that the village says has implications for its own.