VIRGINIA BEACH — Through a consultant, the city has hosted several meetings to gather public sentiment about what local voting system citizens should use to select members of the City Council and School Board.
Only a few of the meetings remained, as this edition of The Independent News went to press, with the last one scheduled to be held on Monday, April 3, at First Colonial High School.
Throughout the city, citizens have had opportunities to weigh in. Some have organized to be part of each meeting over concern the input process will lead to the end of the 10-district system used for the first time this past year, resulting in the most diverse council in the modern city’s 60-year history.
Before the city’s engagement meetings started, the Virginia Beach NAACP hosted a town hall which brought many people – and several local elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott – to Ebenezer Baptist Church. Dr. Eric Majette, president of the NAACP branch, said the gathering on Tuesday, March 21, meant to educate people about efforts to change the new system.
“We are highly concerned about the efforts by the city of Virginia Beach to take us back to a system that would disenfranchise the African-American citizens and other marginalized communities within the city, to include Asians and Hispanics,” Majette said. “What is our goal? Our goal is to inform the public on the benefits of the current 10-1 election system and the importance of voting rights, in general. It’s time to take action and move forward and not backward.”
Several people worked in the following days to ensure support for the 10-district system was represented in what the consultant will provide City Council. Among the speakers during the town hall was Georgia Allen, a former head of the NAACP here. Along with Latasha Holloway, Allen was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the new system here. A judge found the old one discriminatory.
“The 10-1 district system is extremely important for those of us in the city of Virginia Beach,” Allen said. “It’s important because it provides certain benefits. One, it provides representation, but not just representation – full and fair representation. No matter where you live, no matter what your zip code is, you get an opportunity to vote for the candidate of your choice. In the other system, you could vote for the candidate of your choice, but they could galvanize people from another part of the city to prevent you from getting the candidate of your choice.”
Under the former system, even people living outside a residency district helped select said district’s representative.
Under the city’s former voting system, representatives of seven residency districts were selected by all city voters. That system was challenged in a federal lawsuit under the U.S. Voting Rights Act, in which a federal judge found the old system discriminated against minority voters by preventing them from electing candidates of their choice.
The 10-district system, sometimes called a 10-1 system because only the mayor, who is a member of the City Council, is selected by all city voters, was designed by a special master and ordered into effect in late 2021.
However, the city appealed, and, last year, an appellate court determined the matter was moot because state law changed – including a change that said only voters within a residency district can choose their representation – and ended the former city voting system. The appeals court returned the case to the district court judge, and the plaintiffs may have claims depending upon what the city does.
The 10-district system was used in November 2022 because the election process already was underway and there was no time to change it. In December, before new council members were seated, the outgoing City Council decided to engage the public about local voting systems, a process that could lead to a referendum question on the 2023 ballot and, ultimately, a recommendation to the Virginia General Assembly for a charter change to a permanent system.
The City Council in January, including the members selected under the new system, narrowly voted to continue with that effort, which led to the public engagement.
As officials have noted, the city cannot return to its former system, though some voters may prefer it because they could vote for all members of the council and School Board.
“It makes a candidate accountable to people in that district,” she said, comparing the 10-district system to the system in Norfolk, which uses a series of wards and “superwards,” political subdivisions that may include multiple wards but do not cover the whole city.
“You know your candidate, and you work together,” English said. “You still come together as a city, but there are individual things in each ward that may be only particular to your ward.”
Some speakers said the old system had been working and the city should go back to it, in part, because it allowed voters to select all members of governing bodies who are making decisions about how public funds are spent.
Others discusses keeping the new system, with one at Kellam suggesting adding options such as ranked-choice voting.
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Why is Bobby Scott in Va Beach when black candidates ran for office in Virginia Beach. He was nowhere to be found Newport news in the district that he’s in charge of has more calories than anything he should be in Newport news, worried about his district instead of me and Virginia Beach, where he has no word Iran at large in Virginia Beach. It should be at large system.