On Tuesday, the Village of Port Chester, NY, elected its first Latino candidate to public office. With just over 10 percent of the vote, Luis Marino, a Peruvian-born custodial worker and long-time Port Chester resident, earned a seat on the Village’s six-member Board of Trustees.
Mr. Marino’s victory represents the culmination of a four-year struggle to change the face—as well as the structure—of local elections in Port Chester. The effort began in 2006 when the Department of Justice filed suit against the Village under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, alleging that Port Chester’s at-large system for electing its Board of Trustees marginalized Latino citizens by diluting their voting strength in Village elections. While Latinos make up nearly half of the Village population, no Latino had ever been elected to local office.
In 2008, a federal judge agreed with the Justice Department and ordered the Village to replace its existing election system with another, less discriminatory process for electing its Board of Trustees.
The court considered a variety of proposed remedies for Port Chester’s voting rights violation. The Department of Justice argued that Port Chester should be divided into districts with individual representatives—the most common remedy for discriminatory at-large election systems. Such a system would allow the Village to draw Latino-majority districts with the power to elect their preferred candidates.
As an alternative, the Brennan Center, which represented FairVote as amicus curiae, urged the court to consider an election system called “choice voting.” Under choice voting, votersrank candidates in descending order of preference. Candidates who receive high rankings from a sufficient number of minority voters can still gain representation on multi-member legislative districts even if white voters support other candidates.
Ultimately, however, the court selected Port Chester’s own proposed remedy: a system called “cumulative voting,” which the Brennan Center also endorsed. Under a cumulative voting system, voters can distribute their votes in whatever combination they choose. In Port Chester,for example, each voter had six votes to cast as they chose. They could cast all six for a single candidate or distribute their votes among a group of candidates. This system’s flexibility allows minority voters to pool their votes in order to elect their preferred candidates. The results from this week’s historic election—which also saw the election of the first African-American candidate to the Village Board—suggest that Port Chester’s minority voters may have done exactly that.
Yet, while the selection of Port Chester’s first elected minority Trustees certainly represents important progress for this New York suburb, in order to fully understand whether the new system was responsible for that progress we need more information about how minority voters actually voted. Cumulative voting can only empower minority voters if they understand the system. The federal judge that decided the Port Chester case seemed to recognize the importance of community education in his consent decree, which required the Village toundertake a major voter education effort—including mass mailings and public seminars—to teach voters about cumulative voting. Still, questions remain as to whether these efforts ultimately succeeded in giving voters a complete understanding of cumulative voting.
Fortunately, we may soon have this information. FairVote, in conjunction with Port Chester and the New York City Bar Association, organized volunteers to survey Village voters about their voting experiences as they exited the polls. Political scientists will evaluate the responses of these surveys to determine how well voters understood the new system.
We were among the volunteer surveyors stationed at Port Chester’s ten polling precincts on Election Day and, as such, had an opportunity to witness voters’ reactions to the new election system first-hand. As some news outlets anticipated, voters’ opinions on the new system ran the gamut, with some lauding cumulative voting for creating new opportunities and others denouncing the change as unnecessary.
But while voters displayed a variety of different attitudes towards the new voting system, one thing was apparent to us: Port Chester residents care deeply about the way their elections are run. Many of the voters we met had clearly taken the time to reflect on the recent changes to their local democratic process. Our experience revealed that—contrary to certainmedia coverage depicting Village voters as merely pawns in a broader political struggle over race and voting rights—these voters saw the court-ordered exit surveys as a genuine opportunity to share their thoughts about their new election system. Some even viewed the survey as a chance to shape future elections, both in their Village and around the country.
In the end, we still have to wait for the results of these surveys before we know whether the new Trustees were the preferred candidates of minority voters in Port Chester; however, with the increased diversity in Village government and improved turn-out among voters, last week’s election has already offered plenty to celebrate.
In early April, Maryland took a bold step that corrects at least one democratic abuse of its prison population. On April 13, Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law the No Representation Without Population Act. This Act counts individuals who are in prison in their home districts rather than the districts where they are currently incarcerated, when redistricting.
The No Representation Without Population Act ends what many refer to as “prison-based gerrymandering” – a practice that artificially inflates the voting power of prison districts where people in prison are not permitted to vote, while diminishing the power of the prisoners’ home communities where they ultimately return. Though most everyone else gets legislative representation based on their legal residence, Maryland used to ignore residency — which doesn’t change when an individual is imprisoned — for its incarcerated population. Now, the Act will count individuals in prison at their last known residence for Congressional, State and local redistricting.
The new law will help correct skewed representation of minority and urban communities across the state. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 68% of Maryland’s incarcerated individuals are from Baltimore, but only 17% of the state’s individuals are incarcerated – and counted – in the city. The Act also significantly impacts minority representation: Under the new law, many of Maryland’s districts will no longer be built on the backs of mostly African-American “ghost voters,” who count towards district size but are not allowed to vote. Instead, these individuals in prison will be rightfully counted at home, benefiting their predominately African-American communities. Since the average length of stay in Maryland’s prison is just a few years, most people in prison will return home well before the next decennial census. Counting these individuals at their last known address gives them the accurate representation they deserve.
A recent change by the Census Bureau has made it possible for other states to go at least halfway toward correcting distorted redistricting data, as Maryland has done. The Bureau still tallies people in prison where they are incarcerated. But until this year, the Bureau only published prison counts identified as such well after most states have completed their redistricting process. In early February, they agreed to identify where correctional facilities were located early enough so that state and local redistricting bodies can choose to use this data to stop counting incarcerated individuals where they don’t belong, even if they’re not entirely sure where the right home address is. That’s at least a substantial step toward drawing fairer districts.
While more than 100 counties and local governments across the nation have refused to count prison populations at an incorrect address when redistricting, Maryland is the first state to also count them at home. Similar bills are pending in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island.
We applaud Maryland for starting what we hope is a trend among states. And we look to our state leaders to push for similar action nationally.
As Americans, we like to think that voters choose their politicians — but in reality, through the redistricting process, politicians mostly choose their voters. This week, Rep. John Tanner (D-TN) and Rep. Michael Castle (R-DE) introduced powerful legislation that tries to return more of a voice to the voters themselves. This bill, appropriately named the “Redistricting Transparency Act of 2010,” opens Congressional redistricting to allow for meaningful public access, input, and feedback. It’s the first necessary step to holding our representatives accountable for an act ostensibly undertaken on our behalf.
Soon after the 2010 Census, the district lines used to decide which voters elect which members of Congress will be redrawn, block by block. As we’ve recently discussed, most Congressional districts are drawn by state legislators, who may seek to please — or hope to become — their Congressional colleagues. And when the lines are drawn in back rooms far from public view, it’s too easy to conflate personal or partisan interest with public interest. By the time the plans are made available to the public, the deals are done and the decisions are made. There is little opportunity for the public to access the pertinent data and no chance to comment on the draft plans. At no time are legislators asked to explain or justify the lines they draw.
This turns the representative process upside down. With no meaningful public input or accountability, legislators develop the bounds by which their friends are elected. District lines are drawn to protect incumbents from effective challenge and promote a political party’s fortunes. This helps to create a body of legislators that is not as responsive to their constituents’ concerns as it should be, and electoral districts that divide and weaken real communities.
The Redistricting Transparency Act of 2010 offers a basic federal fix to this federal problem. Among other things, the Act requires each state to create a comprehensive website that allows the public to monitor and comment on the redistricting process and the publication ofthe data that feeds it. It also requires each state to share its proposed Congressional redistricting plan before that plan is adopted, and to solicit public comment on the plan. A chance to review and comment on the legislation driving politics for a decade! It is alarming that such a fundamental step seems so novel.
This legislation would make legislators more accountable for their decisions, which is something we’ve supported for a long time. The more transparent the redistricting process, the less opportunity there will be to use line-drawing powers to serve narrow personal interests. We applaud Representatives Tanner and Castle for advancing this cause. With bipartisan support and the public’s interest in mind, this bill deserves the wind at its back.
Karl Rove has lately been broadcasting the importance of downballot elections in places with names like Brushy Creek. This is not a lesson in civics. It is a lesson in power. And he’s right.
Races for state Representative don’t often get much local attention, much less national limelight. But in 2010, a few smaller races will have an outsized impact on the national political stage.
In 43 states, the state Legislature is primarily in charge of drawing the lines for Congressional districts. While some states meaningfully constrain this process, most do not. Together, this means that he who controls the state Legislature can control redistricting — and, as Rove recognized in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.”
The stakes are substantial. Here, I’ll quote Mr. Rove again: “To understand the broader political implications, consider that the GOP gained somewhere between 25 and 30 seats because of the redistricting that followed the 1990 census. Without those seats, Republicans would not have won the House in 1994.” That’s not to mention the narrower political implications of legislators picking some voters and punting others in order to reward friends and punish enemies.
Republicans are gearing up again, with a nationalstrategy to win the state races that will drive redistricting. Democrats plan to vigorouslyfund the other side of the arms race.
The combat will be brutal. Consider this bit of candor, captured during an Illinois county’s 2001 redistricting process [hat tip for the pointer to Mark Rosen]: “We are going to shove [the map] up your f------ a-- and you are going to like it, and I'll f--- any Republican I can.”
If this is the view from the inside, perhaps it is time to rethink the process. There aren’t many good reasons to explain why control of a few local races should be able to rig the national Congressional field. Or why partisan players should be encouraged to “mov[e], say, 20 districts from competitive to out-of-reach,” as Mr. Rove suggests, so that campaigns won’t have to work as hard.
Some offer a Churchillian defense, asserting that giving state legislators the Congressional pen is the worst system we know . . . except for all others. And it is true that alternatives must be smart: A group that does not reflect the diversity of the state, or one that is naive about the many redistricting trade-offs, or one with its hands bound by inflexible rules, may produce worse results than the broken process we have now.
Yet smart exists: in a few states, balanced redistricting bodies limit the biggest conflicts of interest, even without forcing individuals to check their partisan preferences at the door. And the sky has not fallen, even in the Big Sky State. Indeed, as elections in places like Brushy Creek get more attention this fall for all the wrong reasons, more states may want to consider not whether Karl Rove’s advice is right, but whether it should be.
It is a contest nobody wants to win, which you watch with your hand over your eyes. We’ve discussed, again and again and again, the singular dysfunction of New York’s legislature. But California, with a $20 billion deficit contributing to the worst credit rating in the country (now as creditworthy as Libya), and a recent mess in which they either confirmed or did not confirm a lieutenant governor, is fighting for the #1 spot.
The principal difference between the two states? As the New York Times reports today, on the western horizon there is a structural change that may offer some promise for the future.
The change has to do with redistricting. The 2010 census will tell us that different parts of the country have grown at different rates over the last ten years; after the census numbers are in, to ensure equal representation, states and counties and cities will go about redrawing the lines of their districts so that the population is roughly equal. In most of[pdf] the country[pdf], state legislators have assigned themselves the task of drawing the lines for state legislative districts.
That presents an odd conflict of interest, with politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around. It has many effects, including the ability for incumbents to draw lines that cut promising challengers out of the district. Among the more notorious examples: here is Bobby Rush’s congressional district in 2000. You’ll find the residence of then-state-Senator Barack Obama in the northeast; Obama ran against Rush that year, and won more than 30% of the vote in the congressional primary. Here is the district in 2002, after redistricting. Obama's residence is still in the northeast – but if you zoom in, you’ll find that it has been surgically sliced out of the district, by a block or two on each side. In fact, all of Rush’s challengers in 2000 found themselves outside of the new district. It is hard to find an explanation for that that reflects any straight-faced conception of the public good.
In 2008, California voters narrowly passed Prop 11, a ballot initiative taking the power to draw districts for the state legislature out of the incumbents’ hands and giving it to a citizens’ commission (A description of the commission here). There are some very substantial limitations [pdf] on which citizens are eligible [pdf] for the commission, which have earned both praise and scorn; the heartening news, though, is that almost 26,000 apparently eligible Californians have applied for what will ultimately be 14 commissioner spots.
Though I have been telecommuting to the Brennan Center from California for a few years, and study redistricting for a living, I’m not one of the 26,000 applicants: I am too recent a resident to help draw the district lines that will drive state politics for the next ten years. I did, however, have the opportunity to participate in training [pdf] the panel of state auditors [pdf] tasked with picking the 60 most qualified would-be redistricters in the state. The panel has their work cut out for them, to be sure (see the powerpoint, below--it's an overview of what factors the panel should consider). But if an open and conscientious commission reflecting the diversity of the state can be assembled — and both proponents and opponents of Prop 11 are now working together in the hopes that it can — there will be a chance to shape legislative districts based on principles other than the electoral fortunes of those currently in office.
The change to the redistricting system won’t solve California’s legislative woes on its own. But it might help keep California out of the top dysfunctional spot, in a contest I’m happy to lose.
Yesterday, wordspread that the Census Bureau would make a powerful new tool available to the states, counties, and cities needing to redraw political districts after the 2010 census. Along with the standard datafile telling us how many people are assigned to any geographical slice of the country, the Bureau will tell us, at the same time, how many are incarcerated.
This is a big step toward correcting a problem that the Brennan Center’s been working on for most of the decade. Right now, people in prison show up in the census data at the blocks where they are incarcerated, rather than at the addresses they came from in their home communities. The two are usually far from each other. And with the nation’s rising incarceration rate, they lead to a systematic distortion of the population picture.
When districts are based on this data, they build the distortion into the distribution of local democracy. Districts are constructed on the backs of “ghost voters,” packing in prisoners who count toward the district size but who, with few exceptions, are not permitted to vote, and who have no connection at all to the other residents of the district or its welfare. This artificially inflates the political power of voters in prison districts, skewing the incentives of politicians there — and it artificially deflates the power of voters everywhere else. Peter Wagner has done an enormous amount of homework to show exactly how severe the distortion is, complete with a calculator to drive the math home.
For example, after the last census, 1300 of the 1400 people allotted to Ward 2 of the Anamosa, Iowa, city council were in prison. This left political power completely lopsided: the few others in ward 2 had far more leverage than any of their neighbors in town. Indeed, in districts so distorted, we’d hardly recognize what passes for democracy. In 2006, the city council seat for Anamosa’s Ward 2 was won with two write-in votes — one cast by the winner’s wife.
The right way to handle prison populations is to count people at their last known address before incarceration, which is where virtually all prisoners return when they are released. There are already bills afloat inatleastfivestates in this legislative session, on top of a federal bill, to accomplish just that (here’s a complete legislative list). And it’s already required by Mississippi law, at least for local districts. But the clock has run out on administrative capacity to do the same nationwide, for each and every facility, before redistricting starts.
So we turn to the next best thing: even where it’s not possible to get prisoners’ addresses right, it’s possible to take on half of the skew by ensuring that they’re not inflating the locations that are wrong. Instead, incarcerated populations would be addressed as part of the jurisdiction generally, without a more specific geographic tie, just like servicemembers and federal government personnel who are overseas on Census Day. These people are assigned to the state whence they came in order to apportion members of Congress, but not assigned to a specific address within that state that would affect redistricting.
Removing this half of the skew would not completely fix the prison distortion, by reconnecting the incarcerated population to the communities to which they most tangibly belong. But it would take a significant step toward making districts more fair. And this step would benefit all of the remaining voters in the jurisdiction, whose political power is now artificially diluted.
Some jurisdictions already do this. About 1/3 of the counties with prisons in New York State, for example, don’t tie prison populations to local districts. California counties with large prison populations have asked for permission to make the change; for Colorado counties, it’s required. Until yesterday, however, any new jurisdiction that wanted to follow these leaders had to go through the legwork of collecting the necessary data.
The Census Bureau’s new dataset eliminates that cost entirely. All you need to fix half of the skew is to use the Bureau’s incarceration numbers to reallocate prison populations from lopsided districts to the jurisdiction as a whole. And now that the Bureau will deliver incarceration counts at the same time as the other redistricting data, those that want to draw fairer districts, anywhere in the country, will find it much easier to do so.
This week’s New York Times featured an editorial decrying the state’s redistricting practices, with an illuminating set of accompanying maps. One of the best parts about the extremely thoughtful tandem: they focus on the right reasons for reform.
For example, consider former Sen. Velella’s district (NY34, also right). The Times does a particular service here, because – precisely as the material indicates – the primary reason why this district is abusive is NOT the reason that’s most apparent on first blush.
Most people look at the overall shape of this district and think something is awry, and many numerical measures feed that intuition. But part of the odd contours are caused by Long Island Sound, and the islands and waterways that don’t keep to neat and easy geometry. And most of the odd contours have to do with the fact that the bulk of the district is drawn around three other districts in the Bronx that give minorities an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice under the Voting Rights Act, and which make up the “hole” in the center of the district map. Much of the shape we think strange actually reflects values we support.
In truth, the real problems with this district – the real reasons to want change – are the parts the Times highlights. First, there’s Rikers, in the tail of the district to the south, which adds almost 13,000 unrepresented nonresidents to the district, and gives a boost to all of the other district’s residents at the expense of everyone else in the state.
And then there’s the curious little carve-out in the west (see bottom image to the right), slicing away the block around the house where Lorraine Coyle Koppell lived at the time. It’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence that Ms. Koppell got 46% of the vote against former Sen. Velella the year before the maps were drawn. You can see the map-drawers’ attention to detail best by comparing the districts in 2000 and 2002 (image right also): zoom in on the pushpin representing Ms. Koppell’s house. Nor is this sort of thing an anomaly: I’ve also blogged, with similar before-and-after maps, about the redistricting that notoriously lopped Barack Obama out of his district. And that’s just the most prominent example in a very large set.
These are exactly the sorts of problems that reform should be addressing. Big points to the Times for keeping their eye on what matters, rather than what first matters to the eye.
Latinos in Port Chester, New York, have a new and exciting opportunity to make their voices heard. On Friday, a federal judge settled a three-year dispute concerning how the Village elects its Village trustees. In response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act, the judge accepted the Village's proposal to use an alternative system called "cumulative voting" rather than carving the Village into new electoral districts. Latinos make up about half of Port Chester's population, but no Latino had ever been elected to the Village's Board of Trustees or to the office of mayor. The Department of Justice sued under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the town's at-large elections impeded opportunities for the Village's Latino population to elect its own representatives. The judge agreed that the Village's at-large election system denied the Latino population fair representation and the issue then became how to remedy the injustice.
The Brennan Center, representing FairVote as amicus curiae, offered a few creative proposals for how Port Chester could change its electoral system to assure fair representation to the town's Latino population. The Department of Justice argued that the Village should be divided into districts, each one of which would elect one Village representative. Districts are the most common remedy to Voting Rights Act violations, and when drawn correctly, can be effective at improving minority representation. However, drawing districts takes time and expertise, and it often results in partisan jousting. Moreover, drawing the lines can often carve up communities for the sake of the electoral map. In Port Chester, which is about 2.4 square miles and has about 28,000 people, districting would result in small geographic areas with potentially residents on one side of the street being in a different district than their neighbors on the other side.
Moreover, districts are of limited advantage to the minority groups living outside the minority representation districts. This was a special concern in Port Chester where some 80 odd percent of the citizen voting-age Latino population lived outside the proposed remedial district. As the Latino population of Port Chester continues to grow (estimates are that it has grown 73% from 1990 to 2006), having only one district which elects the minority-preferred candidate could create another form of underrepresentation.
Cumulative Voting vs. Choice Voting
As an alternative, Port Chester proposed cumulative voting as a remedy, which allows citizens to cast multiple votes for a given candidate for a given seat. In the case of Port Chester, the six Trustee positions would be up all at one time, so the voters would get six votes to cast among the candidates. If a sufficient number of voters band together behind a candidate by "plumping" their votes, that is, giving all their votes to one candidate, those voters will elect their candidate.
The Brennan Center and FairVote, while supporting cumulative voting as a remedy, proposed an alternate system known as "choice voting." Like cumulative voting, choice voting allows voters from across the jurisdiction to band together, but requires less discipline from voters. In choice voting, voters rank their candidates in the order they prefer them-first choice gets 1, second choice gets 2, and so forth. If a voter rates an unviable candidate first, then the ballot gets distributed to the voter's next highest ranked viable candidate. If a candidate achieves enough votes for victory, then any extra votes for that candidate are distributed to the voters' next viable candidate. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, city council and school board has been electing its members for decades using choice voting and it has been credited for the diversity in those bodies. Choice voting works well when there are multiple candidates preferred by the minority community because there's little harm to ranking one preferred candidate first or second:under choice voting, whoever is the most viable will get credited their supporters' votes, and/or if one candidate has greater support but both candidates are strong, the extraneous votes for the strongest candidate will get distributed to the second-favorite candidate. Choice voting also facilitates the building of coalitions. For example, a Port Chester voting bloc that consists of just about 29% of the turn-out could elect two candidates. A coalition of Latino and African-American voters, with a combined citizen voting age population in 2006 of more than 30%, could do that and no one would have to squabble over which candidate was being ranked first and who was being ranked second. As long as both communities' preferred candidates were ranked first or second, both could be elected if turn-out was high enough.
The court accepted Port Chester's proposal and has ordered the Village to elect its Trustees using cumulative voting. This is a very exciting opportunity for Latino voices to be heard in the Port Chester political process, but Port Chester Latinos must be vigilant about making cumulative voting work for them. All alternate systems depend on enough seats being up for grabs and there being sufficient turn-out to satisfy the mathematical thresholds on which the systems rely. Accordingly, in order for these alternate systems to succeed in increasing minority representation there must be ample voter education and mobilization. Opportunities like this do not come along every day. Port Chester's Latinos now have a real opportunity to elect their candidate of choice, but they must get out and vote!
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