A new voting rights law in New York is already having a dramatic effect, with lawsuits in several local communities seeking to reverse decades of minority voter disenfranchisement.

Weihua Yan had seen dramatic demographic changes since moving to Long Island’s Nassau County.

Its Asian American population alone had grown by 60% since the 2010 census. Why then, he wondered, did he not see anyone who looked like him on the county’s local governing body, the 19-member Nassau County Legislature?

His bid to become the first Asian American on the county’s governing body fell short, and he thinks he knows why.

Minority residents and voter advocates blame a redistricting process overseen by the county Legislature, which has a Republican majority. They say the county political map drawn after the 2020 census was done to mostly preserve the existing power structure, and in doing so prevented minority voters from electing a board that was more representative of the area’s burgeoning diversity.

The county is now facing a lawsuit over those maps. Four Latino residents and a local civil rights organization sued the Legislature earlier this year, claiming it manipulated the mapmaking process to dilute the influence of the county’s Black, Latino and Asian communities. Whites are just 56% of the county’s nearly 1.4 million people but comprise nearly 80% of its governing body.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    12·
    2 months ago

    As we say in Germany, if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.

    Dr. Jens Foell

    • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Where did OP say what table they sat at? I must have missed that. Because all I saw was them mindlessly repeating the wishy-washy false centrist pablum that is commonly pushed. And even then that quote was from a specific time about a specific group. It would still be more accurate to replace Nazi with fascist in general regardless.