The New York State Supreme Court in Orange County overturned the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, a law Democrats were leveraging to take control of local governments and further a pro-illegal-immigration agenda.
The legislation, which was signed into law in 2022, would in part force municipalities to obtain pre-clearance before making changes to how they conduct their voting systems. According to Spectrum News 1, “local governments or school districts with a record of discrimination in New York” were subject to the new pre-clearance rules.
But the legislation was also being used by some to sue towns for how they currently conduct their elections.
The town of Newburgh uses an “at-large” voting system, which means all voters can vote for all the members of the town board, rather than each seat being chosen by voters of a select district. But six black and Hispanic residents sued the town and the town board in January, arguing that the current system inhibits their ability to elect a candidate of their choice. According to the ruling, the complaint claimed that as of 2020, Newburgh had a population of approximately 60 percent white, 15 percent black and 25 percent Hispanic.
The complaint, according to the ruling, alleges that black and Hispanic voters could be “configured within four or five newly created single-member districts,” but “racially polarized voting” inhibits these voters’ ability to “elect candidates of their choice ‘or’ to influence the outcome of elections is impaired, regardless of proof of racially polarized voting.”
The complaint argues that because claims of racially polarized voting exists, the court must “impose certain remedies in the NYVRA [New York Voting Rights Act], including a mandate for new single-member districts.” This means that rather than everyone in the town having the chance to vote for the four board members, the town would be divided into single-member districts where each district would vote for its member.
But the court ruled that the NYVRA “on its face, classifies people according to their race, color and national origin. … A person can only seek relief on the basis of their race, color or national origin and remedies are likewise created based upon those classifications. For Plaintiffs to suggest that the NYVRA is not a race-based (or national origin-based) statute is simply to deny the obvious.”
Therefore, the court held that “[t]he NYVRA is violative of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which is supreme to any law of New York. Therefore, the NYVRA is hereby STRICKEN in its entirety from further enforcement and application to these Defendants and to any other political subdivision in the State of New York.”
Newburgh wasn’t the only town in which Democrats weaponized the legislation to change how elections were conducted. The Town of Mount Pleasant was sued earlier this year by five Hispanic voters who hoped to force the town to abandon its at-large voting system as well.
The voters, who live in Sleepy Hollow (one of the three incorporated villages inside the Town of Mount Pleasant) alleged that the at-large voting system undermined the voting power of Sleepy Hollow’s Hispanic population. Hispanics make up nearly half the population in Sleepy Hollow but only 19 percent of Mount Pleasant, according to the suit. By shifting to a ward-based system, the plaintiffs argued that Sleepy Hollow residents would have a better chance of gaining a seat on the Mount Pleasant Town Board.
But the Mount Pleasant Town Board has limited influence over Sleepy Hollow itself, which has its own local government. The real motive behind the lawsuit seemed to be a push to force Mount Pleasant to accept illegal immigrants. Last year, the town issued an emergency order saying it would not accept illegal immigrants or asylum seekers, citing a lack of resources to accommodate the influx of people being sent to the suburbs of New York City.
The plaintiffs alleged that because “the Hispanic community in Mount Pleasant would be opposed” to the state of emergency, the town is “neglect[ing] the interests of the Hispanic community.”
But Sleepy Hollow remained unaffected by the emergency order and can continue to accept illegal immigrants. They just wanted to force others to shoulder the burden and weaponized the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act to try and achieve that.
