A federal court of appeals heard arguments December 13 in the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri’s case claiming racial discrimination is built into the voting model of the Ferguson-Florissant School District (FFSD) school board.
The ACLU filed the suit, which began in 2014, on behalf of African-American residents of the district and the NAACP. It argued that the at-large voting model prevents the election of the candidates preferred by black voters. The suit claims this electoral disadvantage violates the Voting Rights Act.
A federal court ruled in favor of the ACLU in 2016, but the district has appealed the decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Attorneys for the district and the ACLU made brief arguments to appeals court judges Morris Arnold, Jane Kelly and Lavenski Smith. ACLU attorneys Tony Rothert and Julie Ebenstein argued the decision should be upheld, while attorneys for the district said the ACLU had not shown adequate evidence that the model disadvantages black voters.
The Ferguson-Florissant School District was created in 1975 in a move intended to counter racial segregation in schools. Despite those intentions, there are now only two African-American members on the seven-member board, although students in the district are 77 percent black.
The FFSD board is composed of seven members who are elected in “off-cycle” elections, so that every April either two or three seats are up for a vote. The members serve three-year terms.
In the district’s voting system, voters can choose to vote for one candidate per seat or can opt for “bullet voting,” also known as “single-shot voting.” This means putting all their voting power behind just one candidate, increasing the likelihood of that candidate being elected.
“The witnesses who had been involved in campaigning in FFSD testified almost uniformly that they rarely, if ever, bullet vote or encourage others to do so, except when they are running for office and bullet vote for themselves,” the district court ruling said.
The ACLU first had to establish that African Americans constituted a minority in the FFSD, qualifying them for protection under the Voting Rights Act. They found that voting-age African Americans were a minority, even though black students in the district are a majority.
Through examining the voters preferences in FFSD school board elections, the ACLU established that both black and white voters tended to vote for candidates from their own racial groups, and they had very divergent preferences for school board candidates.
“It is evident that black-preferred candidates are usually defeated, while white-preferred candidates usually win,” the court ruling said. “Since 2000, 24 out of 27 white-preferred candidates were elected (88.9 percent), as compared to 13 out of 27 Black-preferred candidates (48.1 percent).”
At-large voting – voting as a jurisdiction as a whole, without being subdivided into different districts – can dilute the voting power of racial minorities, drowning out their voices with those of white voters and making it more difficult to elect any candidates preferred by racial minorities. According to the NAACP, at-large voting is becoming less and less common for this reason.
The ACLU’s suit pushed for a change in the voting process of the FFSD. Federal judge Rodney Sippel found the district was indeed racially discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act, but did not recommend a specific remedy, instead concluding that the parties to the case should work together on a solution.
“The court agreed that the current at-large system dilutes African Americans’ voting power and undermines their voice in the political process,” Ebenstein, an attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement about the original decision. “This ruling recognizes that voting in Ferguson-Florissant usually results in the election of candidates preferred by white voters only, and helps push back against decades of systemic racism.”
