On September 1, the national Voting Rights office of the American Civil Liberties Union asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Cottier v City of Martin, South Dakota, 10-335. The original 3-judge panel in the 8th circuit had ruled that the city could use cumulative voting for its city council elections, or single-member districts, but it could not continue to use at-large elections. Martin is a very small town with a substantial minority of American Indians. They are dispersed throughout the city so that it isn’t practical to draw single-member districts that would make them a majority in any single district. The city had then appealed to the full 8th circuit, and the 8th circuit had then reversed the original 3-judge panel and said the city should continue to use the same old system it has always used.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
ALL single member district regimes are ANTI-Democracy regimes.
Half the votes in half the districts = about 25 percent indirect minority rule = OLIGARCHY — all tending to be a MONARCHY – i.e. having a gerrymander gang tyrant boss — aka Speaker, Leader, etc.
P.R. = Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes for each seat winner — via pre-election candidate rank order lists — to transfer excess and loser votes.
It’s not so simple.
Martin has always used single member districts. After the 2000 census they contracted with a local council of government to redistrict. The COG somehow used wrong numbers and produced unequal population districts. After this was pointed out, they fixed the numbers and the districts, and the city council adopted the new plan. Those who brought the lawsuit attempted to get a referendum on the ballot, but failed to get enough signatures – and apparently weren’t told until it was too late of their failure. They then sued over the original plan on one-man, one-vote grounds, and after it was pointed out that plan had been replaced, they decided to switch their complaint to the new plan and add their VRA arguments.
The district court had ruled that Martin was not in violation of the VRA, because it did not meet all three preconditions of the Gingles test. It had determined that the minority was sufficiently geographically compact to be a majority in a single member district; and that the minority voted cohesively. However, it found that there was not a preponderance of evidence that the majority voted as a bloc to thwart the minority.
In 2006, a 3-judge Appeals Court panel on a 2-1 vote overturned that decision, and remanded the case to the district court, to continue the analysis of whether a VRA violation occurred, and if so, to fashion a remedy.
The district court then determined that there was a VRA violation, since they had essentially been directed by the 3-judge panel to do so. But the judge decided not to order a new single-member district plan, even though the original determination of a VRA violation had been based in part that it was possible to do so. He instead dictated the use of cumulative voting.
Another 3-judge appeals court panel upheld the district court, again on a 2-1 vote. The dissenting judge suggested sending the case back to the district court to determine whether the original finding that a majority-minority district could be drawn was flawed, and so there was not a VRA violation at all (if Martin could not draw a majority-minority district in the first place, how could they be faulted for not drawing one?). The dissent also argued that the original 3-judge panel should not have overturned the original district court finding
The full 8th Circuit then considered the case. They overturned the original 3-judge panel’s overturning of the original district court’s finding that the 3rd Gingles precondition had not been demonstrated conclusively. So at the present time, Martin has not been found to be in violation of the VRA, so there is no reason to not to continue to use the districts drawn after the 2000 census, and the order of the use of cumulative voting is irrelevant.
The dissent in the full appeal court’s opinion would not have overturned the 1st 3-judge panel’s decision,
in part because the full court had declined to review it after the original decision had been made. But
the dissent would have granted the plaintiff’s motion to vacate the district court’s finding that an effective majority-minority district could not have been drawn, and should instead of used a simple test of 51% majority of the VAP, as suggested in the Supreme Court’s decision in Bartlett v Strickland. So either no VRA violation exists, or at least has not been conclusively shown to exist, or the remedy of the use of cumulative voting is unwarranted.
So if the Supreme Court takes the case, it will probably expend all of its efforts on procedural muck, about whether or not the Supreme Court should overturn the Appeals Court overturning of the 3-judge panel overturning the District court. Around about 2016, it will be discovered that there was a census in 2010 and that perhaps Martin should be permitted to update its city council districts.