[EL] Fwd: Salisbury MD Redistricting Battles

[Larry Levine]

I have felt for some time that the legal challenges forcing district elections in place of at-large elections in small cities and school districts are not always in the best interests of the communities they seek to help. In most cases if the amount of money spent on the legal challenges was applied to political organizing the minority community could elect more members than they receive through the forced districting. I can point to several examples here in Los Angeles County where the “minority” group had enough presence in a city to have actually elected a majority of the city council instead of settling for memorialization of minority status by being confined to just two of five districts. I think one of the worst results of sub-dividing a district into election areas is the Los Angeles Unified School District, even though I was a central player in that effort for what seemed like necessity at the time. What it did is relieved the seven boardmembers of having to put a districtwide perspective ahead of the provincial needs of their local district. Neither the district as a whole, nor the sub-districts have benefited.

Larry

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of David Lublin
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2014 8:07 AM
To: law-election at uci.edu; Rick Hasen
Subject: [EL] Fwd: Salisbury MD Redistricting Battles

 

The election last year in Salisbury MD, the largest city on Maryland's Eastern Shore, is likely to result in the replacement of the two-district plan (one white-majority and one black-majority district) with a new plan that has five single-member districts (two black-majority) with implications for both minority representation and public policy.

 

http://wp.me/p4mKJE-ZY <http://t.co/RuMrUsySVk> 

 

-- 

David Lublin
Professor of Government
School of Public Affairs
American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington, D.C. 20016
http://davidlublin.com/

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