Federal Court Upholds Decision On East Ramapo School District Violation of Voting Rights Act
After a three-year legal battle between the East Ramapo School District and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld its ruling that the district violated Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. The court agreed that there was sufficient evidence of both racially polarized voting and the district board’s favoritism of private schools over public schools.
According to the case documents, district board members were appointed through a slating process that excluded input from minorities. “Influential members of the white, private-school community have an informal slating process by which preferred Board candidates are selected, endorsed, promoted, and elected,” wrote the three-judge court panel. “The Organization does not hold an open call for candidates, and only those with connections to the Organization or its leaders have been introduced, vetted, and selected.”
No minority-preferred candidate won a contested board election from 2008 to 2018, and each minority candidate who won only did so with the approval of the organization, according to the court.
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