The Supreme Court’s voting rights decision this week dealt with a situation very different from Port Chester’s, but the village’s attorney is calling attention to a few lines within the opinion that he thinks have local implications.

Port Chester has already been found in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Essentially, the judge ruled that the deck is stacked against village board candidates who are favored by Hispanic voters; the at-large system diminishes their political clout. So the village is only awaiting a ruling on how its village trustee elections should be remedied. As Randolph McLaughlin, attorney for one of the plaintiffs, told me yesterday, “It’s a dead issue. The only issue before this court right now is whether to create districts or not.”

But as we reported, the Republican challenger for mayor is talking about a possible appeal if the village is ordered to create single-member districts. And this week, attorneys Aldo Vitagliano and Anthony Piscionere, who represent the village, contacted us and said the Supreme Court decision cast doubt on the local ruling.

Piscionere pointed to an aside in the written decision by Justice Kennedy. It has to do with bloc voting by the white majority.

One of the things that the Justice Department had to prove in Port Chester was that the white majority was voting sufficiently as a bloc to defeat the candidates preferred by minorities — Hispanics, in this case.

In the North Carolina case that went to the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy raised questions about whether the bloc-voting requirement had been met: ”(We are skeptical that the bloc-voting test could be satisfied here, for example, where minority voters in District 18 cannot elect their candidate of choice without support from almost 20 percent of white voters….”

Piscionere pointed to evidence that Hispanic-preferred candidates in Port Chester, such as Cesar Ruiz, gained more than 30 percent of the white vote under the old system. He said, “This is the first case that I’ve ever seen (from the Supreme Court, he clarified) that has quantified the level of white bloc voting that should be looked at.” Piscionere had not yet decided whether to raise the issue with U.S. District Judge Stephen Robinson. Here was his formal comment:

The Supreme Court today decided a Voting Rights case which has implications for the Port Chester Voting Rights case. The Court decision casts serious doubt on a key element of the Government’s case and the Court’s decision on liability. The government contended and the Court found the presence of white bloc voting in Port Chester and decided the third Gingles prong against the Village.

Today’s Supreme Court decision questions how a plaintiff could satisfy the third Gingles prong when a minority preferred candidate of choice had support from almost 20% of white voters. In the Port Chester case, Cesar Ruiz and other minority preferred candidates received support from well in excess of 33% of white Port Chester voters.

McLaughlin, who is representing plaintiff Ruiz, said he wouldn’t hang his hat on that argument:

This case (USA vs. Port Chester) asked the question, ‘Has the white community historically over time voted in such a fashion as to defeat minority-preferred candidates?’ The answer to that question is yes, yes and yes.

(Photo: Tom Nycz/The Journal News)

Port Chester folks might be interested in the news out of Osceola, Florida, where a voting rights battle similar to the one under way locally seems to have reached an end.

Osceola County spent a reported $2 million fighting a Justice Department lawsuit before changing its voting system to single-member districts, which will give Hispanics a better shot at electing a candidate of their choice. The county school board, looking at a similar challenge, relented Tuesday. Board members will run in each of five districts instead of serving countywide.

The New York-based Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund had threatened to sue if the board did not change its at-large system, and voters in a referendum favored the change. Half of students in the Osceola school district are Hispanic, but no Hispanic has never been elected to the board.

“The school board did the right thing in giving the citizens of Osceola County what they asked for – fair elections,” Cesar Perales, PRLDEF’s president and general counsel said in a statement today. “We now urge those citizens who want to share power to run for office.”

In Port Chester, the Justice Department is seeking a system of six voting districts, each electing a member to the village board. The Port Chester school board is not a part of the case.

If the U.S. Justice Department has its way, Port Chester will hold a special election this year that would put all six village board seats up for a vote and would draw candidates from each of six new voting districts. After that, two trustee seats would be up for election each year.

This is the remedy proposed today by Justice and plaintiff Cesar Ruiz in their voting rights case against the village, where the election system has been ruled unfair to Hispanics. Their memorandum to Judge Robinson rejects the village’s bid to retain its at-large system, and rejects the argument that any districting plan would be skewed by areas with large numbers of non-citizens.
Non-citizens are simply not an issue the drawing of lines, whether it be congressional districts or the county Board of Legislators, the plaintiffs argue. And they point out a contradiction: Port Chester has been relying on its non-citizen population “to obtain representation and population-based funding at the federal and state levels.”

Below is an excerpt:

Read more of this entry »