By Selwyn Duke
If you thought that “one man, one vote” reflected the full
flowering of representative democracy, think again. In the village of Port Chester, N.Y., just a
few towns north of my locality in Westchester County, there is a new
system. It’s “one man, six votes” —
brought to us courtesy of the U.S. Department of Injustice and a lunkhead of a
federal judge named Stephen Robinson.
Here’s the story:
In 2006, the Injustice Department alleged that Port Chester’s election system
was “unfair.” The problem? While the village is almost half Hispanic, no
Hispanic had ever been elected as a trustee.
Now, how this hapless village got on the feds’ radar screen,
I have no idea. Were Hispanics
intimidated into avoiding the polls?
Were there literacy tests? Poll
taxes? No, this story will not inspire a
movie by the name of Port Chester Burning.
Instead, it seems the problem Uncle Scam
had was that the town’s slim white majority — which turns out to vote in
greater numbers than their Latino neighbors (Hispanics also account for only
about 20 percent of Port Chester’s voting-age population) — along with whatever
Hispanics join them, have thus far chosen to elect only white candidates. That pesky majority rule can be a real bummer,
can’t it?
So the Injustice Department — using our tax money — dragged
Port Chester into court, which, presumably, cost the village tax money in
litigation costs (ain’t being a civil-rights lawyer grand?). It’s enough to make you wonder if the
Injustice Department has too much time and money on its hands, except that it
doesn’t seem to have time to tackle real voter intimidation. Remember that this is the bureaucracy that refused
to pursue the case against the Black Panthers who tried to scare white voters
away from a polling place in Philadelphia.
This brings us to Federal Judge Stephen Robinson. He ruled — get the Digitalis — that the
village’s practice of having conventional at-large elections violated the
Voting Rights Act. Now, let me put this
in the simplest terms possible. The
Voting Rights Act’s purpose was to ensure that everyone would have the
opportunity to vote. Yet this “judge”
decreed that “one man, one vote,” and the attendant majority rule, violate the
act if they don’t yield a politically correct result.
And the kicker is Robinson’s remedy: He approved a plan to
give every resident six votes, which
they can apportion among the six trustees to be elected any way they wish. It’s a scheme known as “cumulative
voting.” No, we’re not in Kansas
anymore, Toto. Heck, I’m not even so sure
we’re in America.
What’s the thinking? I
suppose the idea is that many Hispanics will exhibit great ethnic patriotism
and give all their votes to one Hispanic candidate, whereas whites don’t vote
as a block to the extent other groups do.
Perhaps we’re seeing an example of leftists nobly shouldering the
Liberal White Man’s Burden.
Judge Robinson also ruled that Port Chester must allow
residents to show up on any one of five days to cast ballots, a system called
“in-person early voting.”
So first the left gave us quotas in schools and businesses,
and now we have them in elections. I
wonder, if there is a locality in which whites are only 20 percent of the
voting-age population, with a black majority that has never elected a white
candidate, will the feds roll into town and work the same voodoo? What if it’s an area that’s almost 50 percent
female but that has never voted a woman into office? Maybe we should just cut to the chase and mandate
that public officials must reflect the demographic composition of their
constituencies.
You could also say that this is the next step in the
evolution of get-out-the-vote drives. It
used to be that such endeavors were merely geared toward motivating the
ignorant and apathetic to cast ballots, as we know that such people will make
thoroughly stellar voting decisions if we can only somehow cajole them into the
polling place. But this is so much
simpler: Get out the vote by multiplying it.
We don’t need dead people in Chicago anymore — we have deadheads in the
Injustice Department.
Really, this scheme visited upon Port Chester is just another
example of liberal bigotry. The leftist social engineers are again dividing
people into groups, tacitly claiming that a person of one race cannot adequately
represent a person of another, and changing the melting pot into a cauldron of
ethnic tension.
So on Tuesday, June 15th, there was an election in
a village in New York. In preparation, the
locality had six forums in English and six in Spanish to explain a new,
federally mandated scheme to the voters.
It created various ways of publicizing the election — with tote bags,
lawn signs and tee shirts stating “Your voice, your vote, your village”; and
reminders in the form of TV spots, brochures and handouts given to
schoolchildren, in both English and Spanish — all of which had to be approved
by the Department of Injustice. It also hired a “non-profit” election
research and reform group called FairVote to provide consultation services (our
tax money at work — again). And, when it
came time to cast the votes, “federal observers” were on site . . .
watching.
So once again the compassionate, inclusive left is Balkanizing
us. I just wonder what their quota
prescription will be when it comes time to partition the nation.
This article first appeared at American Thinker
© 2010 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
selwynduke.com 
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