Democracy Dies in Darkness
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IMPERFECT UNION
In an Old West town, new Americans fight for representation
The showdown in Dodge City highlights a method of electing local government that some experts say diminishes minority representation
By Silvia Foster-Frau
December 19, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Noi Siriphone, an immigrant from Laos, and her partner, Ivan Morales, an immigrant from Mexico, laugh as their 9-month-old son, Zayne Morales, plays with a Mexican flag during a traditional holiday celebration in early December. (Meridith Kohut for The Washington Post)
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DODGE CITY, Kan. — For the past 13 years, Hector Almendarez has picked up his hard hat every workday and driven down Wyatt Earp Avenue — passing the Cowboy Capital Saloon & Grill and the Boot Hill Museum, where visitors drink sarsaparilla from the Long Branch Saloon – to work his shift at a nearby meatpacking plant.
He is one of thousands of Hispanic immigrants who have come to this city of 27,000 in Southwest Kansas over the past four decades to work in one of its plants. Known for its cowboy culture and as a symbol of the Western frontier, Dodge City, a quintessential emblem of an older, Whiter America, is now 65 percent Latino, according to U.S. Census data.
But despite its changing demographics, Dodge City’s city commission – the local body in charge of enacting policies that affect its residents most directly, including housing, transportation, and education – remains nearly all White. Almendarez, who makes rounds at his plant registering fellow Latino citizens to vote, believes the commission’s membership might better represent the city’s diversity if its five members were elected from local neighborhoods. Instead, every commissioner is elected city-wide rather than by just one district. Two Latino residents are suing over the practice.
“If we have a big Hispanic population why aren’t we on commission seats and things like that? Simply because the doors aren’t open. The doors are always closed on us, even putting obstacles in the voting process,” Almendarez, 65, said in Spanish.
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Experts who study representation have found that at-large election systems have frequently diluted the minority vote intowns and cities with significant non-White populations across the country. Shifting to what are known as “single-member districts,” in which individual neighborhoods elect their own city councilors and commissioners, can result in a more racially or ethnically representative government, with elected officials who tend to specific communities’ needs, they say. The phenomenon reflects a reality that in many towns and cities, neighborhoods remain highly segregated by race.
But 68 percent of council members in the United States are still elected on an at-large basis, according to a 2018 survey by the International City/County Management Association, an association for local government professionals. That reality has led some experts to worry that government at its most local level can sometimes be the least representative of changing communities.
“Time and time again we have seen at-large systems in many different settings, historical settings and modern settings, have the effect of diminishing the voting power of communities of color in a systematic way,” said Sonali Seth, an equal justice works fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and law institute, who has studied the issue.
A 2021 report from the Legal Defense Fund, an organization that was once part of the NAACP, found that some cities, counties and school boards have in recent years made moves it considers potentially discriminatory, by attempting to convert some board seats from single-member districts to at-large positions.
American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.
The lawsuit against Dodge City is one of several pending across the country filed by residents who have challenged how their local offices are elected. They include two ongoing suits against at-large school board systems in the Houston area and another in Maryland where Black residents and the LDF sued a county board, election board and school board this month.
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Dodge City counters that it is common for cities of its size to have at-large districts and that its Latino residents are not concentrated in certain neighborhoods but instead live throughout the city. Some officials said racial representation in city leadership will come naturally over time.
But not all of its residents agree. Luciana Martinez, who used to work for the city, said other community members have asked her to run for Dodge City commissioner several times. She has turned them down every time.
“I don’t because I don’t feel I would get a fair chance,” said Martinez, 58, stirring a pan of rice for her grandchildren in her home. Pain shoots through her arm, shoulder and back from arthritis she said was brought on by the eight grueling years she spent slicing meat at local plants.
“That’s how it’s always been. It’s always been the good ol’ boys thing,” she said.
‘A historic relic’
After the civil rights movement sparked the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, many local communities scrutinized the effects of at-large elections, particularly in Southern states where Black voters had been disenfranchised for years.
Those concerns led to a 1967 law that required all members of Congress to be elected in single-member districts. But the method of electing local governments — town and city councils, county supervisors, school boards — was left at the discretion of local communities, said Deuel Ross, deputy director of litigation for the LDF.
Though racially discriminatory voting policies had been made illegal, Black Americans “still couldn’t elect candidates of their choice because they were faced with these at-large election schemes,” said Michael Kang, Northwestern University law professor and voting rights expert.
"At-large systems are largely a historic relic,” said Seth of the Brennan Center.
Seth co-authored a November report on the election systems in Georgia’s county governments. It concluded that counties that elected all their members on an at-large basis were significantly less reflective of the racial makeup of their communities than those that elected them by districts.
The at-large systems have become “the quintessential way to stifle minorities,” said Ross of the LDF.
Hindering representation at the local level, he said, also affects the political pipeline of rising candidates of color at the state and national level.
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Some city and town leadership find value in including at least some at-large positions, said Jim Brooks, director of infrastructure practices at the National League of Cities, an organization that advocates for and convenes city leaders and staff. Brooks said such hybrid systems can be a way to bring together some councilors who focus on specific neighborhoods and others who think about the needs of a whole community.
In Black-led Compton, a Latino majority fights for political power
Still, lawsuits challenging at-large elections have been increasingly filed in suburbs and small towns, experts said — places that have seen changing demographics in recent years as people of color move away from urban areas and into the rest of the once-traditionally White suburbs and countryside. Voting rights lawsuits have also focused more and more on expanding access for Latinos, who have now surpassed Black Americans as the largest minority, and Asian Americans, a small but fast-growing segment of the population.
Getting into Dodge
On a large billboard welcoming visitors into town, Dodge City’s name is accompanied with a slogan: “We save the West for you.” The Miss Kitty’s Café appears after, named after the saloon owner in the famed western television series “Gunsmoke,” which is set in Dodge City.
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Downtown, the signs of Dodge’s cowboy roots begin to fade, as shops named La Centroamericana, Los Vaqueros Taqueria Cantina, Dulceria la Chiquita and Mariscos Nayarit line the streets.
One of the town’s old mottos is “Get the heck into Dodge.” And in recent decades, thousands have.
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Immigrant workers predominantly from Mexico and Central America and South America have found their way to this southwest corner of Kansas, drawn by jobs at the four meatpacking plants in the region, which are known for paying better than minimum wage. Since then, the workers have been joined by friends and relatives and made roots of their own, with children and grandchildren who are Dodge City natives.
In 2000, Latinos were 42 percent of the population. More than two decades later, Latinos now make up almost two-thirds of the population, according to the 2022 Census. White residents are now only 28 percent. Among registered voters, 44 percent are Hispanic and 45 percent are White, according to a Washington Post analysis using data from the political data firm L2.
But the demographics of the city’s elected officials have not changed with its population.
The lawsuit challenging Dodge City’s at-large election was brought by two Latino residents, Miguel Coca and Alejandro Rangel-Lopez, and supported by several groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. Filed in December 2022, it contends that no candidate favored by a majority of Latino voters had been elected to the commission in more than two decades, citing instances where candidates who did well in heavily Latino precincts nevertheless failed to win election because of poor performance in White areas.
After the suit was filed, Dodge City commissioner Joseph Nuci, who was elected in 2020, said in a statement that the claim was “categorically false” and that he is Hispanic. The suit’s claims, he said, “misrepresent our commission, and are merely an attempt to divide our great city.”
The two plaintiffs in the suit declined to comment but ACLU lawyer Jonathan Topaz said that regardless of how Nuci self-identifies, Nuci was elected principally by White voters in Dodge City, not Latinos, and so is not considered a “preferred candidate” by the Latino community, which is the focus of the Voting Rights Act. There are also no Latinos on the school board, whose members are also elected by the whole city, one member said.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argue Latinos trail White residents in a number of key measures.
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Census data shows that nearly 16 percent of Dodge City’s Hispanic residents live below the poverty level, more than double the percent of White residents. Ninety-five percent of White residents have graduated high school compared with 61 percent of Latinos. More than a third of White residents hold bachelor’s degrees or higher. Fewer than 7 percent of Latinos do.
“It’s absolutely essential that we fulfill the promise of American democracy and ensure that Latinos in Dodge City or minority groups across the country are able to participate equally in the political process, which is exactly what the Voting Rights Act is aimed at doing,” said Topaz, one of the lawyers on the case.
The lawsuit also cites a 2011 report from a consultant hired by the county that includes Dodge City warning that the city risked litigation and possible action by the U.S. Justice Department if it did not reexamine its at-large elections.
In 2018, the city made national headlines when its sole polling location was moved outside the city limits and more than a mile from a bus stop, and then again when new voters received registration certificates in the mail with the incorrect polling site address.
“This is about more than a decade’s worth of election results and more than a decade’s worth of the Latino community having their right to vote diluted by the at-large election system in Dodge City,” Topaz said.
As she dipped tortillas into salsa, her grandchildren running through the kitchen, Martinez said she believes Latino applicants have been passed over for city jobs and that the city has not done a good job making Latino business owners aware of city services and grant opportunities. She said she hopes the lawsuit will help her grandchildren feel like the city offices she has felt were closed to her would be open to them.
“Now I’m just here ready to teach my grandkids that they can be anything they want to be," she said. “We want them to know that, but we want it to be for real.”
In response to the lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial in February, the city argued in a court filing that Dodge City “goes above and beyond to integrate immigrants into the community.”
“Plaintiffs are grasping at straws to draw inferences of discriminatory intent where there are none,” lawyers for the city added.
In an interview, City Manager Nick Hernandez said the city commission’s makeup will eventually reflect the city’s demographics without legal involvement.
“It will naturally change over time, as the community changes and the demographics change,” said Hernandez, who became the first Hispanic to run the city when he was hired by the commission in 2020. His great-great-grandfather came from Mexico to help work on the railroad here in the early 1900s. Though many of Dodge City’s Latinos speak Spanish, Hernandez said he does not, though the assistant city manager does.
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Hernandez said the city has made significant adjustments to serve its Latino population. City employees who speak Spanish fluently get a stipend. The city successfully lobbied for regular visits from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials to do fingerprinting, paperwork and naturalization interviews for residents to save them the 2½-hour trip to Wichita. Dodge City formed a cultural relations advisory board to learn how to better connect with the community, said Melissa McCoy, the assistant city manager.
Members of the community are also taking things into their own hands. Almendarez, the meatpacking plant worker, has begun a new effort he’s calling Uno Mas Uno to get more than 1,000 Latino young adults in the area registered to vote before the next election.
“If we make sure that the young people are involved, in short order the Hispanic community that’s already large will be present and a part of local decision-making in every county," he said. “That’s my dream.”
About this story
This story is part of Imperfect Union, a series examining the ways Americans feel unrepresented by a political system struggling with a collision of forces both old and new.
Editing by Rosalind Helderman and Griff Witte. Copy editing by Panfilo Garcia. Project editing by KC Schaper. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Design editing by Betty Chavarria.
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