As written about yesterday, a federal judge has halted elections for the school board in the Ferguson-Florissant, Missouri, school district because the process was found to be stacked against African Americans. Mother Jones reports that:
Voters in Ferguson had elected school board representatives every year in two or three at-large races, instead of voting for candidates representing specific subdistricts. The case, filed in December 2014 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and the Missouri chapter of the NAACP, alleged that this practice diluted black voter strength, leaving them "all but locked out of the political process."
More to the point, the ACLU charged that African Americans’ voting strength in the Ferguson area is “diluted:"
Here’s how “vote dilution” works when Ferguson residents vote for their school board representatives. Ferguson-Florissant School Board members are elected “at-large,” meaning each of the seven school board seats is elected by the entire district, instead of “single-member,” which would allow voters to elect a representative to a particular seat designated to their neighborhood. As a minority of the voting age population, African-American voters are systematically unable to elect the candidates of their choice because they are a minority with regard to all board seats. If board members were elected using single-member districts, African-American voters would have a majority in some single-member districts and would consistently be able to elect candidates of their choice to seats on the board.
U.S. District Judge Rodney W. Sippel handed down the decision in a 119-page ruling. Daily Kos readers can study the document for themselves here.