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Residents get 6 votes each in suburban NY election
PORT CHESTER, N.Y. – Arthur Furano voted early — five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.
Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.
Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.
Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas.
Furano and his wife, Gloria Furano, voted Thursday.
"That was very strange," Arthur Furano, 80, said after voting. "I'm not sure I liked it. All my life, I've heard, `one man, one vote.'"
It's the first time any municipality in New York has used cumulative voting, said Amy Ngai, a director at FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group that has been hired to consult. The system is used to elect the school board in Amarillo, Texas, the county commission in Chilton County, Ala., and the City Council in Peoria, Ill.
The judge also ordered Port Chester to implement in-person early voting, allowing residents to show up on any of five days to cast ballots. That, too, is a first in New York, Ngai said.
Village clerk Joan Mancuso said Monday that 604 residents voted early.
Gloria Furano gave one vote each to six candidates. Aaron Conetta gave two votes each to three candidates.
Frances Nurena talked to the inspectors about the new system, grabbed some educational material and went home to study. After all, it was only Thursday. She could vote on Friday, Saturday or Tuesday.
"I understand the voting," she said. "But since I have time, I'm going to learn more about the candidates."
On Tuesday, Candida Sandoval voted at the Don Bosco Center, where a soup kitchen and day-laborer hiring center added to the activity, and where federal observers watched the voting from a table in the corner.
"I hope that if Hispanics get in, they do something for all the Hispanic people," Sandoval said in Spanish. "I don't know, but I hope so."
FairVote said cumulative voting allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes and focuses its voting strength on specific candidates. Two of the 13 Port Chester trustee candidates — one Democrat and one Republican — are Hispanic. A third Hispanic is running a write-in campaign after being taken off the ballot on a technicality.
Folks, this is possibly some of the worst we've seen yet.
Residents get 6 votes each in suburban NY election - Yahoo! News
This makes Barney irate and high-pitched in voice for two reasons:
1. The judge invoked the lack of elected Hispanic representation as a VIOLATION of the Voting Rights Act, and proceeded to ORDER the district to adopt measures to ENSURE the election of a Hispanic candidate, regardless of substance or character, to the city council just because of his/her skin color.
2. The US Department of Justice WAS involved and once again Chicago style politics are deliberately pushing elections in the favor of state-sponsored candidates.
Some people will be like, "But everyone gets six votes!"
But you don't understand. There are more white candidates than Hispanic candidates. Despite a 50% Hispanic population, turnout is very low for their community and a six vote tally will allow the Hispanic voters to pool their six votes in the smaller Hispanic contingency of candidates, statistically outvoting Caucasian voters who would spread their votes over all the candidates rather than just the Hispanic ones.
A very clever and very sinister ploy to hand pick candidates. Not to mention completely unconstitutional.
FairVote said cumulative voting allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes and focuses its voting strength on specific candidates.
Read: Cumulative voting allows a minority group to gain representation if it votes strictly along racial lines, allocating all its votes to one or two preferred candidates.
Read: Cumulative voting allows a minority group to gain representation if it votes strictly along racial lines, allocating all its votes to one or two preferred candidates.
Can't they just do that with a single vote?
Latinos made up 46 percent of the village’s roughly 28,000 people in the most recent census, in 2000, though many were not American citizens. About 43 percent of residents were non-Hispanic whites and 7 percent were blacks, according to the census. No Latino has ever been elected to the six-member village board, and the preferred candidates among Latino voters have usually been defeated.
The odds against winning have been so daunting, Latino advocates say, that only two Hispanic candidates have ever been on the ballot, most recently Cesar Ruiz, who won nearly the entire Latino vote in 2001 but still lost the election.
Even those Latino candidates do not appear terribly optimistic about their prospects.
“What can I tell you? I’m working hard to get elected,” said the Democrat, Luis Marino, 43, a volunteer firefighter in Port Chester who works in the maintenance department of the Scarsdale school system. “If I don’t get in, I’m not going to get upset or anything like that. If I win, excellent.”
Mr. Marino, who was born in Peru, has not helped his chances by eschewing time-honored campaigning techniques like ringing doorbells and walking the neighborhoods to chat with voters.
“I don’t do much walking door to door because I don’t believe in that,” he said. “I don’t like to harass people or aggravate people.” His preferred campaign method? “I just call all my friends and ask them if they’ll vote for me.”
Most articles are very unclear on the exact details, but I believe this is how it worked:
Originally, there were six at-large seats up for election each year. Everyone was allowed to vote for six different people and the top six vote-getters won the election.
Now, everyone still has six votes, but you can allocate more than one vote for each person
The result is that this particular system creates a substantial reward for insularism.
Some of the details for what prompted this case were particularly ridiculous:
So exactly two Latinos have ever even run and lost and this is somehow proof of discrimination?
But hey, with numbers like that, there's no possible explanation for those losses other than racism, right?
Yea, it's gotta be racism.
Folks, this is possibly some of the worst we've seen yet.
Residents get 6 votes each in suburban NY election - Yahoo! News
This makes Barney irate and high-pitched in voice for two reasons:
1. The judge invoked the lack of elected Hispanic representation as a VIOLATION of the Voting Rights Act, and proceeded to ORDER the district to adopt measures to ENSURE the election of a Hispanic candidate, regardless of substance or character, to the city council just because of his/her skin color.
2. The US Department of Justice WAS involved and once again Chicago style politics are deliberately pushing elections in the favor of state-sponsored candidates.
Some people will be like, "But everyone gets six votes!"
But you don't understand. There are more white candidates than Hispanic candidates. Despite a 50% Hispanic population, turnout is very low for their community and a six vote tally will allow the Hispanic voters to pool their six votes in the smaller Hispanic contingency of candidates, statistically outvoting Caucasian voters who would spread their votes over all the candidates rather than just the Hispanic ones.
A very clever and very sinister ploy to hand pick candidates. Not to mention completely unconstitutional.
Folks, this is possibly some of the worst we've seen yet.
Residents get 6 votes each in suburban NY election - Yahoo! News
This makes Barney irate and high-pitched in voice for two reasons:
1. The judge invoked the lack of elected Hispanic representation as a VIOLATION of the Voting Rights Act, and proceeded to ORDER the district to adopt measures to ENSURE the election of a Hispanic candidate, regardless of substance or character, to the city council just because of his/her skin color.
2. The US Department of Justice WAS involved and once again Chicago style politics are deliberately pushing elections in the favor of state-sponsored candidates.
Some people will be like, "But everyone gets six votes!"
But you don't understand. There are more white candidates than Hispanic candidates. Despite a 50% Hispanic population, turnout is very low for their community and a six vote tally will allow the Hispanic voters to pool their six votes in the smaller Hispanic contingency of candidates, statistically outvoting Caucasian voters who would spread their votes over all the candidates rather than just the Hispanic ones.
A very clever and very sinister ploy to hand pick candidates. Not to mention completely unconstitutional.
If this were about a state or federal race, I might join you in your high-pitched voice anger.
It's about a municipality. They can set their elections how they like - as long as the individuals are all treated equally, which, in this case, they are.
It's weird, I grant you. But it's hardly unconstitutional.
If this were about a state or federal race, I might join you in your high-pitched voice anger.
It's about a municipality. They can set their elections how they like - as long as the individuals are all treated equally, which, in this case, they are.
It's weird, I grant you. But it's hardly unconstitutional.
In 2006, the Justice Department sued the village under the Voting Rights Act, saying its system of electing six at-large board members denied the Latino population fair representation. A federal court judge agreed and ordered Port Chester to come up with a more equitable process.
the village has spent more than $1 million on legal bills, and estimated it may spend an additional $300,000 to carry out the new process
An unusual election in a New York City suburb, in which voters could cast six ballots for one candidate, apparently resulted Wednesday in the first Hispanic elected to the village Board of Trustees.
Luis Marino, a school district maintenance director, was in fourth place among 13 candidates for six trustee positions in the final but unofficial vote count, said Aldo Vitagliano, a spokesman for the village of Port Chester.
Marino, a Democrat, had 1,962 votes, well back of leader Bart Didden, an independent, who had 2,576. But Marino was well ahead of the seventh-place candidate, who had 1,272. Only 28 affidavit ballots remained to be counted, Vitagliano said.
I think most of the discomfort comes from the fact that this was hardly the municipality's decision.
I can feel that vibe. But I think it's clear that if the Council had maybe listened to the concerns of 46% of their citizens; it may not have ended up in Court.
Update: One of the Latino candidates won a seat
Hispanic apparent winner in unusual Hudson Valley election | recordonline.com
I guess he had a lot of friends. :lol:
Question for you, if you know.
How does the previous system violate the voting rights act?
What could be rationally drawn out of it to say that it does?
The judge was put in place by Bush and it was done under Bush's justice department. I'm not really understanding how this comes back to liberals...Very fishy politics. Everybody gets one vote. It's fair, and it has always been fair. Any manipulation of that is an attempt to change the system one way or another, and changing a completely fair and free system is never good for ANY reason.
Also this is NOT just ok because it's only a local election. This was under the instructions of a FEDERAL JUDGE. This isn't being done specifically under the instruction of the local politics. I would tend to agree that if they did this as a choice locally only it would be their decision. But this is the FEDERAL government doing this. Very dangerous to our freedoms.
The libs can't seem to avoid bringing race into everything. The system was without racism before. NOW racism has been brought into it by the left.
The Voting Rights Act is an incredibly sweeping piece of legislation that gives Congress extraordinary control over voting methods in all sorts of situations. Under Section 2, any election policy or procedure that discriminates against people based on race or color is invalid. More importantly, this applies whether or not the discrimination is intentional - Even if a district's policies are perfectly race-neutral and are not driving by any racial prejudice, the polices are automatically invalid so long as they have a discriminatory effect.
In this case, even though the municipality did nothing to prevent minorities from being elected, the DoJ argued that because no Hispanics had been elected, the municipality had to change its policies to ensure that Hispanics won some seats.
I tried to find the specific judge. Please link me to where you got your information. Make a note that I'm not asking for proof of what you are saying. I'm not surprised in the least if he was appointed by a republican. Lets not mistake republican for conservative. The two are very different.
I think most people would agree that the decision to unconsitutionally force a local election to change its rules, and doing so in order to get a minority in place who wasn't getting enough votes before is a very liberal move. Would you not agree? I'd have to see this judges history of ruling to decide if they were liberal, conservative, or moderate. I can tell by this ruling they almost certainly are not conservative. Perhaps I should say that his decision was very liberal.
I tried to find the specific judge. Please link me to where you got your information. Make a note that I'm not asking for proof of what you are saying. I'm not surprised in the least if he was appointed by a republican. Lets not mistake republican for conservative. The two are very different.
I think most people would agree that the decision to unconsitutionally force a local election to change its rules, and doing so in order to get a minority in place who wasn't getting enough votes before is a very liberal move. Would you not agree? I'd have to see this judges history of ruling to decide if they were liberal, conservative, or moderate. I can tell by this ruling they almost certainly are not conservative. Perhaps I should say that his decision was very liberal.
I did jump to conclusions based on limited information. Which I strive to NOT do. So I apologize for the rash response. It was more emotional than intellectual.
I tried to find the specific judge. Please link me to where you got your information. Make a note that I'm not asking for proof of what you are saying. I'm not surprised in the least if he was appointed by a republican. Lets not mistake republican for conservative. The two are very different.
I think most people would agree that the decision to unconsitutionally force a local election to change its rules, and doing so in order to get a minority in place who wasn't getting enough votes before is a very liberal move. Would you not agree? I'd have to see this judges history of ruling to decide if they were liberal, conservative, or moderate. I can tell by this ruling they almost certainly are not conservative. Perhaps I should say that his decision was very liberal.
I did jump to conclusions based on limited information. Which I strive to NOT do. So I apologize for the rash response. It was more emotional than intellectual.
Just another example of liberals taking offense to the will of the people and going to court to change it.1. The judge invoked the lack of elected Hispanic representation as a VIOLATION of the Voting Rights Act, and proceeded to ORDER the district to adopt measures to ENSURE the election of a Hispanic candidate, regardless of substance or character, to the city council just because of his/her skin color.
Just another example of liberals taking offense to the will of the people and going to court to change it.
Under this argument, since no woman has been elected President, women should get extra votes on election day.
Such changes may seem radical departures from the electoral systems with which we are most familiar. Indeed, they may be unwanted by the people in the several States who purposely have adopted districting systems in their electoral laws. But nothing in our present understanding of the Voting Rights Act places a principled limit on the authority of federal courts that would prevent them from instituting a system of cumulative voting as a remedy under §2, or even from establishing a more elaborate mechanism for securing proportional representation based on transferable votes.
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