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Nassau County voting map lawsuit tests New York voting rights act In one of the
most segregated U.S. regions — New York's suburbs — voters of color are waging
an unprecedented redistricting fight with an emerging tool for protecting voting
rights at the local level.


ELECTIONS


A LOCAL REDISTRICTING BATTLE IN A NEW YORK CITY SUBURB MAY LEAD TO A NATIONAL
FIGHT

February 7, 20246:30 PM ET

Hansi Lo Wang

Enlarge this image

Voters of color in Nassau County, N.Y., a segregated suburb of New York City,
are waging an unprecedented redistricting fight under a state voting rights act,
an emerging tool for protecting voting rights at the local level. Tracy J. Lee
for NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Tracy J. Lee for NPR


Voters of color in Nassau County, N.Y., a segregated suburb of New York City,
are waging an unprecedented redistricting fight under a state voting rights act,
an emerging tool for protecting voting rights at the local level.

Tracy J. Lee for NPR

NASSAU COUNTY, N.Y. — In 2020, Maria Jordan-Awalom marched across an invisible
line in one of the most segregated regions of the country.

After the police murder of George Floyd, she and other demonstrators took to the
streets for racial justice in this New York City suburb, just east of the
borough of Queens on Long Island.

There were no barricades blocking the road into the next community over, but
crossing from the predominantly Latino and Black village of Freeport into the
predominantly white hamlet of Merrick, their peaceful protest was met with
jeers.

"Go back to where you came from!" Jordan-Awalom remembers hearing from onlookers
on the sidewalk.

"It hits different when you're an immigrant, obviously," says the president of
Freeport's school board, who was born in El Salvador and first moved to this
village on Long Island's south shore as a teenager. "But also knowing that
[they] were just angry because we were Black and brown people, that's what hurt
more. We're neighbors."

Sponsor Message




ELECTIONS


A FEDERAL COURT DECLINES TO REVISIT A RULING THAT COULD WEAKEN THE VOTING RIGHTS
ACT


ELECTIONS


3 NOVEL LEGAL ARGUMENTS BY REPUBLICANS THAT THREATEN THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IN
2024

Almost four years later, neighbors from the two communities are sharing the same
representative in county government. That's because, in early 2023, officials in
the Republican-controlled Nassau County Legislature approved a redistricting
plan that drew large swaths of Freeport and Merrick into the same voting
district.

The new political map has left Jordan-Awalom wondering: "What similarities do we
have with the community who is telling us, 'Go back to where you came from'?"

The law firm that created the map with the county's then-top Republican
legislator pointed to the communities' fire departments providing emergency
backup services for each other, plus a shared rail line and an "economic
corridor" running along the same road where Jordan-Awalom marched.

Still, the map has perplexed many residents of color. In a county scarred by
decades of housing discrimination, they say its voting districts split up their
communities and ignore many of the lines that separate them from predominantly
white areas.

A group of them, including Jordan-Awalom, and an organization called New York
Communities for Change are now waging a legal battle against the map with stakes
that go beyond the shores of Long Island.

On Wednesday, they filed a novel lawsuit, arguing that the Nassau County
Legislature intentionally passed a redistricting plan that discriminates against
Black, Latino and Asian American voters in order to give Republican candidates
an advantage in elections. Their case could not only result in a different set
of voting districts for a county of close to 1.4 million residents, but also
create a pathway for voters of color elsewhere to lead a new kind of fight
against racial discrimination in redistricting at the local level.

Enlarge this image

Maria Jordan-Awalom, a resident of Freeport, N.Y., says she is fighting for a
new redistricting plan for the Nassau County Legislature that keeps her
predominantly Latino and Black village united in one voting district. "I feel
like if we're not represented as whole, the representative will go to that
powerful white voice before they listen to our concerns," Jordan-Awalom says.
Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Hansi Lo Wang/NPR


Maria Jordan-Awalom, a resident of Freeport, N.Y., says she is fighting for a
new redistricting plan for the Nassau County Legislature that keeps her
predominantly Latino and Black village united in one voting district. "I feel
like if we're not represented as whole, the representative will go to that
powerful white voice before they listen to our concerns," Jordan-Awalom says.

Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

In Nassau County, voters of color and white voters tend to prefer different
candidates. And the number of people identifying as white and not Hispanic has
dropped more than 11% over the past decade, as Black, Latino and Asian American
residents now make up more than a third of eligible voters. But on the current
map for the county legislature, those voters of color make up the majority of
eligible voters in only four out of 19 districts, or less than a quarter. The
map's challengers argue there should be six such districts.



"The white voice always seems to overpower our voices. And I feel like if we're
not represented as whole, the representative will go to that powerful white
voice before they listen to our concerns," says Jordan-Awalom, who wants to keep
her village united in one voting district. "We have had the same fight for so
long, so obviously we're not being heard. And I think it has to change."

That change, she hopes, will come through an unprecedented way of directly
challenging a local voting map under a state voting rights act — an emerging
tool that advocates hope can help fortify the rights of voters of color as
opponents continue to chip away at protections against racial discrimination
under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Legal experts, however, warn that critics of state voting rights acts are eager
to test the constitutionality of these state laws with the U.S. Supreme Court's
conservative supermajority, and this New York case could spark an appeal that
may ultimately lead to the undoing of these protections across the United
States.


HOW NEW YORK'S STATE VOTING RIGHTS ACT LED TO A NEW KIND OF REDISTRICTING
LAWSUIT

In the decade since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the
federal Voting Rights Act, a small but growing number of states — including
Washington, Oregon, Virginia, New York and Connecticut — have followed the lead
of the California Voting Rights Act of 2002 by putting in place additional legal
protections against racial discrimination in voting. New York's John R. Lewis
Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 2022.


ELECTIONS


RESTORING THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IS STILL ON THIS ALABAMA DEMOCRAT'S AGENDA

The scope of each law is different, including how they apply to specific
elections. While there have been many redistricting lawsuits under state voting
rights acts over the past two decades, those cases have been challenges to
elections in which multiple candidates are elected as at-large representatives
of one voting district.

New York's state voting rights act is among those that allow a map of multiple
voting districts, each with a single representative, to be challenged in court
for diluting the collective power of voters of color. And the lawsuit against
the Nassau County Legislature's map is breaking new legal ground in state
courts, according to Ruth Greenwood, an expert on state voting rights acts, who
directs Harvard Law School's Election Law Clinic.



"A lot of lawyers like to think that the U.S. Supreme Court is as fancy as it
gets and you should try to do everything you can there," Greenwood says. "But
the reality is that if you're trying to protect communities, you need to use the
absolute best tools available to them. And in this case, the U.S. Supreme Court
is not a friend to the Voting Rights Act. And so it makes sense to go through
state voting rights acts."

To argue that a voting map dilutes the collective power of voters of color under
the federal Voting Rights Act, challengers have to show in court that, in the
words of a landmark Supreme Court ruling, "the minority group" can make up the
majority of and fit inside a "majority-minority district" — a hurdle that can
take a lot of time and redistricting experts to overcome. That's not the case
with these state voting rights acts.

That difference allows these state laws to address racial discrimination in
places where residential segregation may not be as extreme, says Perry Grossman,
who helped develop New York's state voting rights act and is now the lead
attorney for the Nassau County map's challengers.

"It's taking less taxpayer resources and less resources on the side of voters of
color to root out that discrimination," says Grossman, who also directs the New
York Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project. "It also offers more
opportunities for jurisdictions to remediate their schemes voluntarily, which we
want to see. We want to see jurisdictions take that opportunity to do it
themselves rather than get sued for it."



The challengers of Nassau County's map tried to avoid a lawsuit by sending a
formal letter in December to county officials, as required by New York's state
voting rights act. The letter claimed the current redistricting plan is not in
line with the state law because its boundaries impaired the ability of
communities of color to elect their candidates of choice and influence election
outcomes.

But the county legislature has refused to make any changes, keeping in place a
map that was introduced late in the redistricting process by the top Republican
legislator at the time, Richard Nicolello, who rejected plans put forth by a
bipartisan redistricting advisory commission.

The legislature passed that map in February 2023 on a party-line vote with 11
Republicans in favor and seven Democrats against it. The vote came after
contentious public hearings, where Democratic county legislators had a hard time
getting Nicolello and an attorney from Troutman Pepper, the Atlanta-based law
firm that put together Nicolello's map, to elaborate on how they came up with
the districts.



No districts in Nassau County needed to or could be "race-focused districts" in
order to be in line with the federal Voting Rights Act, concluded Sean Trende,
an elections analyst for RealClearPolitics who advised Nicolello, according to a
memo released by Troutman Pepper.

"We, therefore, did not consider race any further in redistricting because that
would have been unconstitutional," attorney Misha Tseytlin, a partner at
Troutman Pepper who previously served as Wisconsin's solicitor general,
explained at one hearing.

Tseytlin later added that the firm thought it is important to read New York's
John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act "consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court's
precedent against racial gerrymandering."

"Any other conclusion that would read the John Lewis law as a requirement for
infusing race into every redistricting decision, in the U.S. Supreme Court's
interpretation of words, would render the John Lewis law unconstitutional, and
we definitely don't want to do that," Tseytlin said.

Tseytlin, Trende and the legislature's Republican majority caucus, through a
spokesperson, declined NPR's interview requests. But in an email statement, Mary
Studdert, the caucus' spokesperson, said: "The adopted maps incorporated
feedback from the public's testimony from over a dozen public hearings, while
meeting all legal and constitutional standards, uniting communities of interest
and ensuring equal representation for the residents of Nassau County."


"...THEY PUT THAT LID RIGHT BACK ON TOP OF US"

Lisa Ortiz, an Afro-Latina resident of southern Nassau County, however, is
concerned that representation is not equal now that her home in the
predominantly Black hamlet of Lakeview has been drawn into the same district as
the predominantly white village of Malverne.

The change forced Lakeview out of a district with neighboring communities of
color, and Ortiz, a registered Democrat who was previously represented by a
Black Democrat, now has a county legislator who is a white Republican.



"When you think about Lakeview being grouped into a district that really has the
power to silence our vote, it discourages people. Why should I go out and vote?
My vote is not even going to count. That defeats the purpose of living in a
democracy," says Ortiz, who is one of the redistricting plan's challengers in
the lawsuit.

Enlarge this image

Lisa Ortiz, a resident of Lakeview, N.Y., stands under the new street sign for
Acorn Way in the predominantly white village of Malverne, where many Black
students from Lakeview attend schools. The street was previously named Lindner
Place after a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in New York. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide
caption

toggle caption
Hansi Lo Wang/NPR


Lisa Ortiz, a resident of Lakeview, N.Y., stands under the new street sign for
Acorn Way in the predominantly white village of Malverne, where many Black
students from Lakeview attend schools. The street was previously named Lindner
Place after a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in New York.

Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Troutman Pepper, the law firm that drew the county legislature's map, justified
the change by citing the "strong community of interest" created by the two
communities sharing the same school district.

But many Lakeview residents remember the struggle to get the district to fund
school bussing for Black students in Lakeview after the district was ordered to
desegregate. And until last year, the street in front of one of the district's
elementary schools in Malverne was named after a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in
New York, Paul Lindner, who was once also the namesake of the school.

Ortiz was relieved to see Lindner Place become Acorn Way at the unveiling of the
new street sign last January, weeks before the Nassau County Legislature passed
the new voting map.

"We were able to accomplish one thing with the street renaming, but then they
put that lid right back on top of us," Ortiz says.


WHY THIS REDISTRICTING FIGHT COULD END UP BEFORE THE U.S. SUPREME COURT

Towards the northwest corner of Nassau County, Jerry Vattamala, an Indian
American resident of the village of New Hyde Park, sees a similar tactic playing
out through the current redistricting plan. The county's Asian American
population has grown over the past decade by around 60%, the highest rate among
all racial and ethnic groups.

The map's lines cut through a growing Asian American community in an area known
as Greater New Hyde Park, where thoroughfares are lined with gurdwaras, Hindu
temples, bubble tea shops and Asian-owned grocery stores, plus annual events for
Diwali and Lunar New Year are organized by town government officials.



"Anyone that lives in the area just by looking at it can see, 'Oh, look! They
divided us into three different districts' — right in the heart of where most of
the people live," says Vattamala, who is a member of New York Communities for
Change, one of the map's challengers.

Because of where Asian American residents live in the county, it may be
difficult to draw a viable voting district where Asian Americans make up the
majority.

But Vattamala hopes to see a new map with what's known in the redistricting
world as an "influence district," where there would be enough Asian American
voters to have a significant influence on who is elected to the Nassau County
Legislature, which has yet to have an elected legislator of Asian descent. Under
the current map, two Democratic candidates who could have been the county's
first Asian American legislators lost to Republicans last year in races for
seats in Greater New Hyde Park.

"We're not asking for special treatment or to have any type of advantage," says
Vattamala, an attorney who leads the Asian American Legal Defense and Education
Fund's Democracy Program. "What we're demanding is an equal opportunity to elect
a candidate of our choice, just like other communities enjoy, mainly the white
community in Nassau County."

Enlarge this image

Jerry Vattamala attended a Lunar New Year event organized by officials from the
town of North Hempstead, N.Y., in January. Vattamala says he hopes to see a new
voting district with enough Asian American voters to have a significant
influence on who is elected to the Nassau County Legislature, which has yet to
have an elected legislator of Asian descent. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Hansi Lo Wang/NPR


Jerry Vattamala attended a Lunar New Year event organized by officials from the
town of North Hempstead, N.Y., in January. Vattamala says he hopes to see a new
voting district with enough Asian American voters to have a significant
influence on who is elected to the Nassau County Legislature, which has yet to
have an elected legislator of Asian descent.

Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Still, Greenwood of Harvard's Election Law Clinic warns that critics of state
voting rights may be preparing to challenge that position in court by arguing
that what laws such as New York's require in redistricting amounts to racial
gerrymandering.

"I think some people see that when you're trying to enfranchise people of color,
they see that as creating maybe a quota or some set-aside so that people of
color have access to the political system," Greenwood says.

Greenwood has helped file friend-of-the-court briefs arguing against a
Republican precinct committee officer in Washington's Franklin County who has
asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a case about the constitutionality of
Washington's state voting rights act.



The case against the Nassau County Legislature's map may be headed for the high
court, too.

"If this leads to the New York voting rights act getting struck down as
unconstitutional, that won't only affect people in Nassau County," Greenwood
says. "It'll affect everybody in New York and potentially everybody in all of
the states that have state voting rights acts."

It's a possible scenario that Tseytlin, the Troutman Pepper attorney, hinted at
multiple times last year during a public hearing about the county's map.

"This was just enacted," Tseytlin said about the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act
of New York. "This is the first cycle. Perhaps, there will be a test case here
coming up."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

Visuals edited by Grace Widyatmadja

Research by Jane Gilvin, Nicolette Khan and Barclay Walsh

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