August 7, 2007

The Westchester municipality has been governed by a six-member board of trustees and mayor, all elected at-large rather than from districts, since 1868 -- but the U.S. Department of Justice has decreed that it must now move to district-based elections so as to elect more Hispanics, and a federal judge is sufficiently impressed with this case that he casually canceled a forthcoming town election. Visiting AEI fellow Edward Blum, who's writing a book on voting rights law, asks: what's wrong with this picture?

P.S. On the many surprising consequences of the VRA, the best single-volume source is probably still Manhattan Institute scholar Abigail Thernstrom's 1987 Whose Votes Count?