Gainesville a proving ground for Latino political hopes

But the Voting Rights Act is no magic wand. Mounting a successful voting rights lawsuit takes tremendous technical expertise, time and money. People who have been disenfranchised rarely have those things.

The Voting Rights Act created powerful tools to root out electoral systems that, by their structure, diminished the weight of minorities’ votes. The most sweeping was a requirement that places with a history of discrimination get approval from the Justice Department before changing any election procedure. Georgia was among the covered states.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the so-called "pre-clearance" requirement. That leaves lawsuits such as the one Gonzalez is contemplating as the primary enforcement tool. In the past, a city, county or state once had to prove its proposed system didn't discriminate against minority voters; now the affected individuals must prove that it does.

A last resort

Gonzalez stresses he doesn’t want to sue; he’d much rather work things out with the city.

The issue in Gainesville is at-large elections, an electoral system common throughout Georgia. The city is divided into five wards; each gets one council member who lives in it. But voters from throughout the city determine who those representatives will be.

At-large elections benefit the majority. In Gainesville, the majority of voters (if not of residents) are non-Hispanic whites.

“Imagine if people in New York and California and Nevada all had a vote in who was the U.S. Senator from Georgia,” said Arturo Corso, a lawyer and sometime politician in Gainesville. “That’s what at-large voting is.”

City leaders are adamant that the at-large system is best for the city, fostering cooperation and spreading responsibility for all neighborhoods across the whole council.

A statement on the city’s website reads: “To insinuate that the City discriminates against anyone, or as stated in The (Gainesville) Times that the City, ‘has an ugly history of discrimination’ is hurtful and simply wrong. Our City has a reputation for being culturally inclusive – where we celebrate what makes us different and recognize what makes us the same.”

A scarcity of voters

Latino immigration into Georgia has surged over the last two decades, especially in areas such as Gwinnett County, Dalton and Gainesville.

In anticipation of the redistricting that would follow the release of 2010 census figures, Gonzalez attended a crash-course in Washington on number-crunching, district-drawing and voting law. Back in Georgia when the numbers came out, he saw that three of Gainesville’s five districts had populations that were majority Latino.

But with at-large elections, he believes, the likelihood of a Latino getting elected is slim to none.

“On the surface it’s a no brainer,” said Gonzalez. “The system is inherently unfair to Latinos and African-Americans.”

But for a lawsuit to succeed, it would have to show much more: that people in Gainsville vote in racial and ethnic blocs, and that it is technically possible to draw a cohesive district with enough potential Hispanic voters to make them a significant force.

That word "voters" — citizens of voting age, as opposed to merely residents — is a major hurdle. In the existing districts, Latinos account for 3 percent to 14 percent of active voters. (In many areas, the concentration of Hispanic residents is much higher, but many of them are children, non-citizens, people who aren't registered to vote or who are registered but rarely go to the polls.)

The counter-argument is that until the system itself is changed to give Latinos a realistic hope of electing a candidate of their choosing, their participation will be artificially suppressed. “We know, and courts have taken notice, that voter registration and turnout may be depressed by the consistent inability to elect a candidate of choice,” said Brian Sutherland, an attorney who is working with Gonzalez.

Laying the groundwork

GALEO has done some of the fact-finding and analysis needed to build the foundation for a suit.

Their analysis has found what they believe is solid evidence of racially polarized voting, but they've been hampered by a scarcity of data. Matt Barreto, a Seattle-based Latino voting rights advocate who did the analysis said that compared to other places that keep data online, getting historic voting data from Georgia "was a nightmare."

The alternative, conducting a survey, would take money, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars. “We’re a nonprofit,” Gonzalez said. “That would present us with a high cost.”

Representatives of elections officials at the state and local levels said they follow procedure and strive to assure transparent and fair elections.

The next step for GALEO, showing that it’s physically possible to draw a heavily Latino district, takes another consultant with specialized computer and demographic skills.

If GALEO sued the city and ultimately won, their costs would be paid by the government, Gonzalez said. But winning isn’t certain. In 1991 African-Americans sued Gainesville over at-large voting. The case dragged on for a decade and they lost the final appeal.

That was a bitter defeat for those who had long claimed that the city’s voting system kept non-whites out of power.

Anybody can run

In 1972, black-white tensions in Gainesville erupted in violence that spilled over from a brawl at a high-school football game. A delegation of black leaders met with city leaders to explain their feeling of powerlessness in the face of an all-white government, and to make demands that included changes to the city election system.

“We’ll never get a black elected on an at-large basis,” newspapers quoted one unnamed woman as saying at one of those meetings.

Then-mayor Joseph Stargel rebutted, “We’ve had a lot of black candidates.”

To which she replied, “Yes, but none have been elected.”

Charles Bullock, a voting expert and professor at the University of Georgia, helped Gainesville in its earlier case. He thinks the argument about at-large elections suppressing Latino votes doesn’t wash when faced with such low voter registration numbers. He also thinks at-large voting has some benefits.

In fact, the white majority in Gainesville has elected an African-American, Myrtle Figueras. She supports the at-large system.

“It has worked for us for years and years,” she said in an interview this month.

In Figueras’s ward, 53 percent of voters are black, according to the Secretary of State, but the Hispanic population is growing fast.

“I have been on the city council now for 18 years. I can be elected — as anybody can,” she said. “Latinos can be elected. Anybody has the right to run.”