New York mayors have slammed a series of racial lawsuits that seek to gut the voting process in several towns, saying the cases are an attempt to oust conservatives from power.
Civil rights lawyers have filed lawsuits against at least three municipalities in majority-white towns, arguing that they are preventing black and Hispanic voters from voting by holding “city-wide” elections.
“I believe this is an underhanded effort by Democrats to get rid of the two-party system and wipe out the Republican Party in New York,” said Carl Fulgenzi, mayor of Mount Pleasant, one of the last Republican strongholds in reliably Democratic Westchester County.
Mount Pleasant is one of at least three predominantly white towns in Orange County, along with the Republican-dominated town of Newburgh and the town of Cheatowaga, which is split between Democrats and Republicans, that are facing lawsuits from civil rights lawyers under the New York John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act.
More lawsuits are likely to follow: Some say the new law could fuel a litigation frenzy, as it requires defendants to pay plaintiffs’ legal costs if they’re found to have violated the law.
Gov. Kathy Hockle and the Democratic-run Legislature approved a new Voting Rights Act for 2022, named for civil rights icon and late Georgia Rep. John Lewis, after expressing concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal government were rolling back voting rights enforcement under the Trump administration.
Many towns, villages, and school districts use a city-wide voting system in which local voters elect all government representatives, rather than dividing areas into districts or neighborhoods.
The bill also requires that dozens of local governments with large minority populations, including New York City, seek “pre-clearance” from the office of state Attorney General Letitia James to ensure that voting changes do not harm minority voters. The first plans are due to be submitted in September.
A lawsuit filed against Mount Pleasant by five Hispanic plaintiffs argues that no Hispanic candidate has ever won an election under the village-wide voting system in Sleepy Hollow, a village within Mount Pleasant, even though nearly half of the residents are Latino.
“Because white voters make up the majority of the electorate, the racially polarized voting of Mount Pleasant’s town-wide municipal election system typically, almost exclusively, denies the town’s Hispanic voters the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice to town council,” says the lawsuit filed earlier this year by Robert Sporzino of Abrams Fensterman.
The same law firm has filed voting rights lawsuits against the cities of Newburgh and Cheektowaga.
Voting rights attorney Jeffrey Weiss was hired by local governments to study the issue and has recommended that Mount Pleasant and other cities repeal at-large voting policies.
“District-wide voting systems are vulnerable to legal challenges and make it harder for minority candidates to win district-wide elections,” said Weiss, who is also a professor at New York Law School.
He recommended electing town representatives from neighborhoods rather than the entire town, to increase the chances of black and Latino candidates winning, or suggested using cumulative or ranked-choice voting systems.
“The town rejected the proposal. They went in a different direction,” Weiss said of Mount Pleasant.
“This is a potential problem. I expect we’ll see more of these lawsuits in the future.”
Fulgenzi acknowledged that he and other Republicans on the town council rejected Weiss’s recommendation and hired an outside law firm that filed a countersuit arguing that New York’s voting rights law is unconstitutional, and vowed to take the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.
He said Mount Pleasant provides limited services to residents of Sleepy Hollow, which has its own government and elections. Mount Pleasant has its own police, fire and trash collection services, but primarily provides tax collection services to residents of Sleepy Hollow, which has a Hispanic candidate elected.
This fact, Fulgenzi argued, weakens the argument for voting rights.
“I’ve never heard a Hispanic person come up to me and say, ‘My vote doesn’t count.’ I’ve never heard anyone say they were disenfranchised. It doesn’t make sense. It’s an insult,” he said.
Fulgenzi said he sounded the alarm among New York’s Republican leadership.
“if [Republican representation in] “If Mount Pleasant sinks, the Republican Party sinks with it,” he said.
