Why Don’t Our Elected Officials Look Like Us?
posted on: October 17, 2014
In August, a federal judge ruled that Yakima, Washington’s prevailing election system violates the Voting Rights Act, finding that “the non-Latino majority in Yakima routinely suffocate the voting preferences of the Latino minority.”
In early October, a U.S. District Court in Virginia ruled that the state’s congressional district maps illegally concentrated the state’s African American voters into a single district in order to dilute their influence in others.
These rulings go to the heart of remarkable and, indeed, incendiary new research by Who Leads Us?, a project of the Women Donors Network’s Reflective Democracy Campaign. The research shows in sharp terms just how poorly the demographics of America’s elected officeholders reflect who we now are as a nation:
- 90 percent of officeholders are white, compared to only 63 percent of the population.
- Men hold 71 percent of elected offices, even though they are just 49 percent of the population.
- White men hold 65 percent of elected seats, although they are only 31 percent of the population.
What’s more, the analysis shows this “pattern of de-facto exclusion of women and people of color from elected office begins far below the national level, with state- and county-level offices also showing stark disparities.”
The WhoLeads.Us website provides not only clear visualizations of these findings, but also access to the data itself, which covers some 42,000 officeholders – the most extensive such database assembled to date.
This systemic exclusion from power is at odds with our core beliefs in representative democracy, and underlies the kind of injustice so plainly visible now in places like Ferguson, where the population is 67 percent African American, but the police force is 94 percent white (and most elected officials are also white).
Nonprofit organizations and foundations have taken the lead in confronting this injustice, targeting election laws and procedures that disproportionately affect minority voters. In Yakima, the Win/Win Network and Central Washington Progress spearheaded a campaign to institute district elections for the city council. Such intervention was necessary because, although the city’s population is over 40 percent Latino, no Latino candidate has ever won a city council race there. While that initial campaign lost, the subsequent lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union won.
But as heartening as the Yakima and Virginia decisions were, other recent decisions, especially by the U.S. Supreme Court, have been erratic at best, horrific at their worst. On October 8, the Supreme Court upheld recently passed restrictions on voting in North Carolina, which the NAACP and the Advancement Project noted amount to suppressing African-American votes. And while the next day, the Supreme Court blocked Wisconsin from enacting similarly restrictive voter identification laws for this November’s election, a federal appeals court has now allowed Texas to proceed with a law that a lower court judge ruled was intentionally crafted to suppress Black and Latino votes.
So as the WDN report clearly shows, we have our work cut out for us. With or without the support of the courts, nonprofits and foundations must continue to advocate for leadership that effectively reflects our population.
For more information about how today’s social justice movement can fight ongoing threats to our civil rights, such as voter discrimination, tune into NCRP’s upcoming webinar on October 23, “Freedom Funders Then and Now: What Lessons Foundations Can Learn from Philanthropy during the Civil Rights Movement.”
Dan Petegorsky is senior fellow at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @ncrp on Twitter.
