Saturday, June 19, 2010

The shape of elections to come?

In a town near where I live, Hispanic residents complained that even though they made up 52% of the voters, there had never been a Hispanic Commissioner elected. They complained, and the Federal Government stepped in and changed the election rules.

A similar complaint was made in New York, and a Judge solved it by allowing Hispanics to vote 6 times each. Six times. Each.

This sort of thought process has a few flaws:
1 Who says that a Hispanic must always vote for a Hispanic candidate?  After all, if Hispanics make up more than 50% of the electorate and still don't elect a Hispanic, then how is that a violation of rights? Maybe the Hispanics don't WANT a Hispanic candidate.
2 What happened to one person/one vote?
3 Will this be expanded to other demographic groups? Gays? Women?
4 Or maybe we should just let judges do all the voting.

In the New York article, Hispanics complained that they made up 25% of the voters, but had never elected a Hispanic candidate. Let's do the math:


There is an at-large voting system in this town, where the  30,000 voters elect 6 commissioners. Hispanics make up about 7,500 voters. If they voted 6 times each, they got a total of 45,000 votes out of a total possible 67,500 votes. They had, as a voting block, 67% of the votes, yet the Hispanic Candidate came in fourth. That tells me that the Hispanic Candidate is not getting all of the Hispanic votes. Under this system, the Hispanic voters could control 4 of the 6 seats, and there is nothing anyone could do about it. (If they split their 45,000 votes 4 ways, each of their candidates would get 11,250 votes. The remaining  22,500 the voters would at best split their votes two ways to enter a 6 way tie for the 6 seats.) Even with this advantage, the only Hispanic candidate elected came in fourth.



What comes next? Will Illegal immigrants will get the right to vote, and a judge will let them vote six times each? 10 million illegals, six votes each= 60 million votes. Pretty good trick, since there were only about 130 million votes cast in the 2008 election.

The five states with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants are California (8%), Texas (6.4%), Florida (5.4%), Illinois (5.2%), and New York (2.7%). Those 5 states alone control 169 electoral votes, with only 270 needed to elect a president. With illegals controlling six times their numbers in votes, they would become the second largest voting block with 60 million votes, with only our 46.9 million Hispanic citizens controlling more with about 150 million votes. (The next largest voting block would be voters over 65, with only 40 million votes, and think of the clout that the AARP has)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't understand how allowing anyone to vote for anyone 6 times is legal - that just boggles the mind. If a hispanic had never been elected to whatever office, MAYBE it was because THE PUBLIC - not JUST the hispanics - did not think they were suited for the position?

Wayne Conrad said...

Am I mistaken, or did the voting system give six votes to every votor? If so, this doesn't raise my hackles.

Well, except that the judiciary is chest deep in social engineering.

Divemedic said...

That is my point- we are allowing the courts to determine the winner of the election.