Number of the Day

[Content Note: Racism; voter suppression.]

40: The number of years it has been since a Latin@ candidate was elected to the Yakima, Washington, city council, despite the city's population being one-third Latin@.

Why? Because: "Cities Are Quietly Reviving a Jim Crow-Era Trick to Suppress Latino Votes."

Yakima, WA is one-third Latino, but a Latino candidate has not been elected to the city council for almost 40 years. Santa Barbara, CA is 38 percent Latino, but only one Latino has been elected to its council in the last 10 years. And Pasadena, TX is 43 percent Hispanic, but the ethnic group is not even close to being proportionately represented in the city government.

All three cities have been or are currently being sued for allegedly using discriminatory at-large voting systems, a voter dilution tactic that has been recently and frequently been employed against Hispanic voters. In an at-large system, every city resident votes for each member of the governing body and the city does not divide voters into districts.

As the Latino population grows across the country, cities have employed at-large voting to dilute the Latino vote and maintain white control of local governing bodies. Instead of allowing each district to elect its own representative, an at-large system means that unless Hispanic populations reach a majority in the entire city, they will have no influence in electing their local members of government. According to Fair Vote, at-large systems allow 50 percent of voters to control 100 percent of seats, typically resulting in racially homogeneous elected bodies. The tactic used to be popular in the South to discriminate against neighborhoods with large African American communities but is now targeting a new threat: Latinos.

There is much, much more at the link.

Remember this Quote of the Day from last week?

"The fundamental challenge for my side is the seemingly inexorable change in the composition of presidential electorates. And there's no reason to believe that that's going to stop magically."—Republican pollster Whit Ayres, discussing a new report co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution, which found that "about 70 percent of the Americans eligible to vote are white, a decline of 15 percentage points since 1980."

About which I said: "The GOP will continue to double-down on racebaiting, voter suppression, and gerrymandering."

Yeah. Well. This is what that looks like.