Abstract
The 2002 California Voting Rights Act requires that jurisdictions that elect board members at-large establish single-member election districts in order to give more political power to groups protected under Section “Statistical Methods Currently Used to Identify Racially Polarized Voting” of the Federal Voting Rights Act if (1) minorities comprise a substantial share of the population and (2) there is evidence of racially polarized voting (also called “racial bloc voting” and “minority vote dilution”). This paper describes two methods that have been accepted by the courts for identifying racially polarized voting. These are the “homogeneous precincts” and the “ecological regression” methods.
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- 1.
California Elections Code, Section 14026:
“As used in this chapter:
(e) “Racially polarized voting” means voting in which there is a difference, as defined in case law regarding enforcement of the federal Voting Rights Act (42 U.S.C. Section 1973 et seq.), in the choice of candidates or other electoral choices that are preferred by voters in a protected class, and in the choice of candidates and electoral choices that are preferred by voters in the rest of the electorate. The methodologies for estimating group voting behavior as approved in applicable federal cases to enforce the federal Voting Rights Act (42 U.S.C. Section 1973 et seq.) to establish racially polarized voting may be used for purposes of this section to prove that elections are characterized by racially polarized voting”.
- 2.
One could conduct a Chi-Square or Fisher’s Exact test to suggest the probability that the observed pattern might occur by random chance.
- 3.
Measures of the population used in ER include voting age population, citizen voting age population, registered voters, and actual voters in each group of interest.
References
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Greiner, D. J. (2007). Ecological inference in voting rights act disputes: Where are we now, and where do we want to be? Jurimetrics, 47, 115–167.
King, G. (1997). A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://j.mp/kpuI5R.
King, G., Rosen, O., & Tanner, M. (2004). Information in ecological inference: An introduction. In G. King, O. Rosen, & M. Tanner (Eds.), Ecological inference: New methodological strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press. (http://j.mp/ln9wgx and http://gking.harvard.edu/gking/files/eiintro.pdf).
Leoni, M., & Skinnell, C. (Spring 2009). The California Voting Rights Act. The Public Law Journal, 32(2). (www.calbar.ca.gov/publiclaw).
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Gobalet, J., Lapkoff, S. (2015). Who Must Elect by District in California?. In: Hoque, M., B. Potter, L. (eds) Emerging Techniques in Applied Demography. Applied Demography Series, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8990-5_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8990-5_18
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