Dear George,

Regarding the question of the ward system: in the current New Yorker, on-line, in an article about the Voting Rights Act (1965), Jeffrey Toobin writes the following:

"'The Voting Rights Act was a transformative statute,' Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at Columbia Law School, says. "It¹s hard to think of any civil-rights law in any walk of life that has been as dramatically effective." In more recent years, the law has gone far beyond such basic issues as eliminating the poll tax; it has, for instance, stopped cities from annexing suburbs to dilute the importance of the minority vote, and the law has made sure that city councils are elected by neighborhood, rather than in at-large citywide races, which had been another way to limit the number of minority candidates who would win seats. As a result of all its changes, according to Issacharoff, 'the act created a black political class that is now deeply embedded and politically savvy.' The civil-rights establishment - which includes interlocking networks of public-interest organizations, legal academics, and social scientists - is now conducting a sober and uncertain appraisal of the law, but doing so with little momentum
and unclear goals." http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040920fa_fact

In our present context, the operative sentence in this context is: "the law has made sure that city councils are elected by neighborhood, rather than in at-large citywide races, which had been another way to limit the number of minority candidates who would win seats."

Are we bound by the Voting Rights Act?

Perhaps more important, Toobin reports on how the Justice Department is replacing career attorneys with political appointments, thus jeopardizing the traditionally non-ideologically-biased enforcement of the law.

Yours,

Katherine McNamara (electronic mail, September 15, 2004)