Massachusetts News
By Paul Moreno

November 1--The U.S. is breaking the law by suing the city of Lawrence over voting rights, say many experts. A trial is scheduled for March 2000 because the city has decided to fight the suit.

"The justice department pays no attention to Supreme Court rulings on voting rights," says Abigail Thernstrom of Lexington, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of America in Black and White and Whose Votes Count.

She told Massachusetts News, "They’ve been ignoring the court for a long time. After all, how many troops does the Supreme Court have?"

Roger Clegg, vice president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, and former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, agrees. "The justice department has been defying the rule of law in all kinds of civil rights cases for a long time," he told Massachusetts News. "And it’s gotten worse under President Clinton."

The justice department’s efforts are orchestrated by Bill Lann Lee, the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, who was never confirmed by the senate because of his extreme views on racial preferences.

"Unfortunately," Clegg says, "Lee’s tenure to date vindicates those concerns. Lee persists in using his legal arsenal to impose support for and defense of racial preferences without regard to the rule of law and to the detriment of all Americans."

Started Last Year

The U.S. sued the city of Lawrence in November 1998, claiming that it was violating the Voting Rights Act. Its principal evidence was the fact that Lawrence, while 40 to 70 percent Hispanic in population, has only two Hispanics in city offices.

The city denies that it is violating the act and will defend its system in the trial.

The U.S. demands that the city abolish its partially at-large voting system for city council and school board, and adopt a district system that, by gerrymandering the district lines, will maximize the number of Hispanics elected.

In at-large systems, candidates are elected by voters of the entire city rather than by a particular area. 

"The Voting Rights Act does not require the city to maximize the number of minorities," Assistant City Attorney Bob O’Sullivan told Massachusetts News. "It only requires fair treatment, equal treatment."

Recent Supreme Court decisions have indicated that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional, but the justice department has not changed its policy of suing to promote that.

The Supreme Court struck down an outrageously drawn North Carolina congressional district in a 1993 case, calling it "political apartheid." The next year it said that the maximization of minority officials was not required under the act. In 1995 it warned, "Racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society."

U.S. Demanded Poll Workers by Quota

Roger Clegg notes that the department originally demanded quota hiring of poll workers, "so that the number of Hispanic poll workers in the city reasonably corresponds to the percentage of registered voters in the city and that the number of Hispanic poll workers in each polling place reasonably corresponds to the percentage of Hispanic registered voters assigned to that polling place." 

He recently told Congress that, "Justice department policies often pile absurdity on top of absurdity."

But the city wants to retain its mixed council system, in which six seats are elected by district and three at large.

"Systems like ours have been upheld by the courts, and ours is perfectly defensible," O’Sullivan says.

"You can’t just assume that Hispanics aren’t getting elected because of white racism," Thernstrom told Massachusetts News. "You have to ask if there has been any serious efforts by Hispanics to get out the vote and get viable candidates elected."

And the voting strength of the city’s Hispanics appears to be growing, without the help of the justice department. 

A group of Hispanic leaders has formed a group called "Latino Agenda" to mobilize the city’s voters.

The justice department’s strategy may backfire in the long run, Thernstrom notes. If Hispanics are a majority of the city’s voters, and voted as a block, they would benefit from at-large elections.

In fact, two members of the congressional black caucus, North Carolina democrats Eve Clayton and Melvin Watts, have introduced legislation to allow elections for U. S. representatives to be conducted on an at-large basis.

Civil Rights Enforcement Polarizes the Races

The justice department has encouraged this sort of racial balkanization for a number of years, Thernstrom says. "The Bush justice department and even the Reagan administration went along with these ‘majority-minority’ gerrymanders," she says, "because Republicans benefited when black voters were removed from their districts."

Even worse is the tendency for such enforcement of the civil rights laws to polarize Americans on the basis of race. "Civil rights laws were originally intended to bring our country together, and to eliminate irrational and unfair practices," says Roger Clegg. "As these laws are now being enforced, however, they promote irrational and unfair practices – and they are driving Americans apart."

Racial gerrymandering removes all incentives for different groups to work together in politics. It assumes that only blacks can represent blacks and that only Hispanics can represent Hispanics, despite many cases in which white majorities have elected blacks and vice-versa.

In September, Democratic primary voters in Baltimore, a majority black city, chose a white candidate for mayor, Martin O’Malley. Although race was not a serious issue in the campaign, The New York Times’ headline read, "Baltimore Democrats Pick White Councilman in Mayoral Primary," and The Washington Post’s read, "White Man Gets Mayoral Nomination in Baltimore." The Post soon apologized for its headline, but not the Times, which now owns The Boston Globe.

The Times ignored and misrepresented the facts during the 1982 Voting Rights Act debate, according to Professor Raymond Wolters, whose book, Right Turn, chronicles civil rights policy in the 1980s. Thernstrom concluded that the major media acted as part of a "civil rights lobby" in the 1982 debate.

City’s Compromise Refused

Lawrence has tried to avoid costly litigation over the issue, and has offered to compromise with the justice department. But the department will not accept anything less than a conversion from at-large to district voting.

The city agreed to abolish at-large voting for the school committee in a settlement with the department in September. It also agreed to:

• Create a Spanish-language Election Information Program designed to assist Spanish-speaking voters at every stage of the electoral process; 

• Hire a bilingual program coordinator who will operate the program with input from representatives of the Hispanic community;

• Translate election information into Spanish and disseminate Spanish translations prepared by the Secretary of State’s office of all election information the state generates;

• Develop and implement an outreach and publicity program that will provide election-related information to Spanish-speaking voters through the local Spanish language media and community groups and provide for regular meetings between the city, the program coordinator and representatives of the Hispanic community;

• Assign at least four Hispanic, bilingual poll workers to work in 18 of the city’s 24 voting precincts and assign at least one Hispanic, bilingual poll worker working at all times during the election day at the six other precincts; and,

• Assign poll workers in a non-discriminatory manner to leadership positions in the polling places.
 

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