Cumulative Voting--Affirmative Action at the Polls?

Meredith Jessup | June 16, 2010 1:13 PM

In case you missed it, Drudge linked to this AP story yesterday about a town in New York that is using "cumulative voting" to pick village trustees. In this process, the voters get 6 votes spread among their favored candidate(s).

Whatever happened to the "one man, one vote" principle? A federal judge and the U.S. Justice Department threw it out:

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. ...
Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.
Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act...

The Voting Rights Act outlaws discriminatory voting practices; it DOES NOT guarantee proportional representation based on ethnicity or race.

This ridiculous decision would seem to run directly contrary to the spirit of the Voting Rights Act; it suggests that a Hispanic cannot be effectively represented by a white person and vice-versa--a totally bogus notion, especially in a country that prides itself on being a melting pot.

When did affirmative action insert itself into the democratic process? Probably since progressive groups like FairVote.org started demanding it.