'We are in an area that is very conservative,' said Vianney Castro, a native of the Dominican Republic and a Democrat who lost November's mayoral election in Hazleton by about 25 percentage points. 'They have refused to change. And everything that is happening around us is change'A federal lawsuit argues the way representatives are elected to a local school board in Pennsylvania's coal region is unfairly shutting Latino voters out of power.
Two mothers of children enrolled in the anthracite coal region district sued in February, asking for changes to a system they argue dilutes their voting strength and violates the federal Voting Rights Act and the constitutional right to equal protection of the law.The district's 78,000 residents are about 55% white, 40% Hispanic and 5% Black, Asian or multi-racial, according to the lawsuit, with Hispanics concentrated around Hazleton.
“We are in an area that is very conservative,” said Vianney Castro, a native of the Dominican Republic and a Democrat who lost November's mayoral election in Hazleton by about 25 percentage points. “They have refused to change. And everything that is happening around us is change.” “Plaintiffs fail to allege with any credible specificity that the claimed Hispanic group of voters is politically cohesive or that the White majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate — both assumptions flatly refuted by the reality of the partisan demographics of Hazleton,” the board’s lawyer wrote.
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