New district voting maps are counterintuitive
The new voting district map drafts recently released by the school district miss the point of hispanic representation completely.
During the summer, the school board received a letter from law firm Shenkman & Hughes demanding that board elections change from an at-large election to a district-based election. Shenkman & Hughes represented the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), an organization founded in 1974 in order to ensure the voting rights of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.
The letter stated that “voting within the Conejo Valley Unified School District is racially polarized, resulting in the minority vote dilution, and, therefore, the District’s at-large elections violate the California Voting Rights Act of 2001(CVRA).” For more information on the letter and the drafting process please visit the Panther Prowler website.
The maps were supposed to increase hispanic representation by giving them a common district that allowed their voice to be heard. All three of the maps proposed by the district and their independent demographer fail to group the hispanic communities in the Conejo Valley into one district, instead dispersing them throughout all five districts. If the drafts are approved, the Hispanic vote will be diluted even more than it already was. The hispanic population votes will be overpowered by the other groups in the community. Please refer to the maps on page five and on the CVUSD website.
We have a large hispanic population whose voices are not being heard now and these new districts are not going to fix that. Instead, their voices are going to be swallowed just like before.
Additionally, a census has not been taken since 2010, yet the maps are still being based off of it. Odds are, the hispanic population in the Conejo Valley has increased since 2010. Therefore the map drafts do not even represent the current state of our community in terms of minority population.
I’m no expert in drawing district voting maps but this effort seems counterintuitive and half-hearted. This has been a completely useless endeavor since the new districts will in no way increase minority representation.