Latino Voters Sue Madera Unified School District

[annm4peace]

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/08/21/18528496.php

The Lawyers’ Committee filed a lawsuit today on behalf of Latino voters against the Madera Unified School District (MUSD), charging that the school district’s at-large method of election is racially polarized and violates the California Voting Rights Act of 2001 (CVRA). The suit challenges the school district’s discriminatory voting system and seeks to protect the Latino community against vote dilution.
Latinos constitute approximately 44% of MUSD’s voting eligible population. Yet, only one of the current school board members is Latino. And over the past 25 years, no more than one Latino has ever occupied a seat on the board. This is a result of MUSD’s at- large voting system, which along with a racially polarized electorate, has repeatedly resulted in a school board with little or no Latino representatives despite the significant Latino population in MTJSD. The at-large method of election prevents Latino residents from electing candidates of their choice or influencing the outcome of school board elections.

[roody]

1. Good for them.

[Xithras]

2. I hope they have better luck with it than Modesto did.

Latino advocates files similar suits against the city of Modesto for similar reasons a few years ago, claiming that their at-large voting system diluted Latino votes. Like the Madera school district, the Modesto City Council only had one hispanic on the board during the last 50 years. That's a problem when over a third of the population is hispanic.

The problem they're having now is that there is no one part of the city with a high enough density of hispanic voters to create a "safe" hispanic district. Even though more than a third of the city is hispanic, they discovered that those hispanics live EVERYWHERE in the city, and are a minority throughout every part of the town. Modesto does have a "little Mexico", but it's very small in comparison with the rest of the city.

The only way to create a hispanic "safe" seat is to combine various poor areas of the town, which are geographically, historically, and economically unrelated to each other, into a single district. That would give hispanic voters in those poor areas one single councilperson on the six person council. Even worse, that one hispanic council person would be elected by hispanics representing only the poorest parts of town, and only about 15% of the towns overall hispanic population. The move puts a hispanic on the board, but 85% of the towns hispanics will still be represented by majority whites with little interest in hispanic political issues.

As if that weren't bad enough, the people in those disparate areas don't WANT to be combined together. They rightly point out that the needs of South Modesto, with its industrial job base and its lack of streetlights and sidewalks, makes their Little Mexico resemble the real one. West Modesto, on the other hand, has all the modern amenities like sidewalks, but lacks jobs and has a stratospheric crime rate. The needs of the areas are very different, and the residents argue that a single person would not be able to represent all of their differing needs. The problem is, if they are NOT combined, the population in the individual districts are too low to justify a council seat and they have to be combined with neighboring wealthier areas. Those wealthier areas are predominantly white and politically active, and will rob the poorer hispanic majority areas of any worthwhile representation.

It's a mess. The whole point of the move to district elections was to put hispanics on the board, but the hispanics themselves don't want to embrace the one option that would let that happen.