Limited voting produces a Kabuki dance extraordinaire | Eastern North Carolina Now

        Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    If you're not sure what a Kabuki dance is you should have been at the July Beaufort County Commissioners meeting. They all put on one that should win a Japanese Academy Award. It was over what kind of electoral system should be used to elect the county commission.

    You can watch the show in the video below. It came in the form of a "final report and recommendation" from the study committee headed by Commissioner Gary Brinn. Brinn ran for County Commissioner on a platform of doing away with the "Limited Voting" system currently in use for the Beaufort County Commission. But the recommended change does not eliminate the limited voting system. It simply would add one more vote every other election that a voter could cast for four seats to be filled.

    The current system is the result of a lawsuit filed by black voters and ordered by a Federal judge after the plaintiffs and the county agreed on the limited voting system in lieu of a district system. The court order is still in effect. So to make any change would require either the case to be dismissed or the judge to approve a revision. The recent Supreme Court case specifically upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part applicable to Beaufort's case.

    The Supreme Court's decision tossed out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, but left standing Sections 2 and 5. That means that the criteria for the application of a new Voting Rights Act would have to be designed by Congress, i.e., a new Section 4. But the Voting Rights issue is not nearly as significant to Beaufort County as the court order.

    In other jurisdictions, getting such a court order dismissed has turned on two issues: Whether the original reason for ordering a remedial electoral system has been eliminated and/or whether the plaintiffs in the original case, and their successors, agree to a dismissal.

    To review, the system attacked in the Beaufort case was an at-large system (such as that used by the Washington City Council) which had never elected a minority commissioner.

    On the latter point the most significant thing in this charade that is being played is that all of the minority members of both the study committee and the county commission have said they oppose any change. That is a difficult hurdle to overcome. Legal precedent says that in order to overcome such resistance the defendants (county) must show that the current voting patterns are such that the vestiges of prior discriminatory practices no longer exist. That would indeed be very difficult to prove in Beaufort County. The proof comes from the numbers. Yet the committee presented no data to support its recommendation. The Observer requested to review the data they used and Mr. Brinn failed to respond to our request. We would suggest that tells you something. If the committee has the data it is not disclosing it and there must be a reason for that.

    Our own cursory analysis of the voting patterns in Beaufort County in commissioners races (as opposed to some municipal elections) is that racially polarized voting not only still exists, but a statistical case can be made that it is even stronger now than it was when the current limited voting system was put in place. Given that fact, the case law says that whatever system is designed must mitigate against that polarization to the extent that it is practical and that a change can be made only if it would insure that minorities can at least have a reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice at least as much under the new system as they did under the old system being revised. Yet, in explaining his proposal Mr. Brinn states unequivocally that the new system would not "change things." But that is not true.

    The proposal on its face is to double the number of votes cast in alternate years (when four seats are open) and keep the single vote in the other years when three seats are up. The problem with that is obvious. You are doubling the ability of the majority to elect candidates of their choice while forcing minorities to have to choose whether to dilute their voting strength or, as Mr. Brinn points out, to single shot vote. That of course reduces the minority voting strength while the majority's strength is being doubled. On its face, that is unequal. We will predict here and now that such a plan would never be approved under the current case law and in the face of opposition from the minority community, unless the Committee can produce some current data that would indicate otherwise.

    It would require much more space than we have here to fully explain it, but suffice it to say that if most whites cast both of their votes when eligible and most blacks single-shot their vote then the system on its face is discriminatory and has virtually no chance of sustaining the burden of showing that it ameliorates the effects of the previously discriminatory at-large system or that it would not be regressive. While that could be proven in the City of Washington, the patterns are the opposite in the county.

    The fatal flaw in the Committee's Proposal is that it does not provide the data to show that it would work. And by "work" we mean better than the alternatives. Those alternatives are: 1. The existing system, and 2. A district system. Of course there are other methods, such as preferential voting (every voter gets as many votes as seats to be filled but they vote by rank ordering their choices), but the Committee apparently did not even consider them. We assume there is a reason for not doing so, but again the data would have to support the conclusion that such a system was neither intended nor it have the effect of making it more difficult for minorities to elect at least two of seven seats.

    Moreover, Mr. Brinn, in the video below, in referring to the "Arrington" plan, fails to explain that Dr. Arrington based his proposal on 2000 census data and old voting patterns. At the very least, if the Committee was serious about the Arrington Plan, it would have updated the data. And if the Committee were really serious, it would have produced a plan that had at least some minority support.

    So if you're following us up to this point you now know why we call it a Kabuki dance. Mr. Brinn and his handlers on the committee know it is not going to be approved. They don't even intend for it to be approved. He simply does not have the votes on the Commission much less the legal basis for getting the court case dismissed. He has not done his homework to show that his version of Limited Voting is fairer than the current system.

    So the court will want to know "why" are you proposing this? Mr. Brinn has yet to answer that question. Thus, we assume he really does not believe his proposal will fly and we would therefore presume it is little more than a charade to make it appear that he fulfilled a campaign promise, knowing all the while that the outcome has already been determined.

    In other words, it's all show.