Do Dodge City’s at-large elections keep Latinos out of office?

A federal lawsuit that claims Dodge City’s at-large election system denies Latinos fair representation in city government “makes perfect sense” to Alba Gutierrez-Ortiz, a lifelong resident.

“Representation matters,” she says. “When you have people of a certain demographic on the City Commission – and I’m not just talking about race here, but income level too – how are they going to know about the issues that affect you?”

On the other hand, one of the few Latinos who’s been elected to the City Commission offers a different explanation for why so few Dodge City Latinos serve in local elective office: complacency.

Fernando Jurado, who served as city commissioner from 1998 to 2000, says that Hispanic involvement in the city has always been “somewhat” lacking. “I’m not saying they never participated, but there was a lack on a higher level. Going to meetings, attending presentations or things of that nature, those are things I did myself.”

Jurado, who now lives in Greeley, Colorado, ran for reelection in 2000 and lost by two votes. Only one Latino has been elected to the municipal governing body since, Joseph Nuci. He lost his reelection bid in November and left his seat in January.

The absence is notable because, by about any measure, Latinos are shaping the present and future of Dodge City. Over 65% of Dodge City residents identify as Latino, and nearly half of its residents are Latino citizens of voting age.

The lack of representation is no coincidence in the view of ACLU Kansas.

A little more than a year ago, ACLU Kansas and other voting-rights groups filed a lawsuit against the city claiming that its at-large election system unlawfully dilutes the votes of Latinos – depriving them of proper representation. The complaint lists two Latino men as plaintiffs and is set to go to trial in federal district court in Wichita on Feb. 27.

The lawsuit is the latest skirmish over Latino voting rights in and around Dodge City. In 2018, Ford County was sued after the county clerk moved the Dodge City’s only polling site outside the city limits.  A congressional investigation into voter suppression techniques in 2020 looked into that relocation.

The recent litigation is bringing national scrutiny to the community, including a story in The Washington Post . But Dodge City officials contend that its election system isn’t unusual for a city its size and that Latino residents are spread throughout the city, rather than in particular neighborhoods. Among the state’s 26 first-class cities, 15 use at-large districts and 11 use districts or wards.

Dodge City Manager Nick Hernandez, the first Hispanic to serve in that role when he started work in early 2020, said in an email that city officials expect the community “will naturally begin seeing more Latino representation” over time as the number of Latino voters grows.

But Gutierrez-Ortiz argues that the current at-large system affects representation now. It has elected, she says, a City Commission made up of members clustered in the wealthier part of town, apart from a large share of constituents they are supposed to represent.

“There’s this running joke that it’s a bad side of town – the south side of the railroad track,” she explains. “There’s a lot of streets down south that are just terrible. And there’s more push to start up incentive districts north of the railroad tracks.”

She explicitly references Comanche Street, an east-west avenue in the northern part of the city.

“If you talk to anybody in Dodge City and ask ‘What’s up north of Comanche?’ They’ll tell you, ‘Oh, it’s rich people.’ It’s people that make more money. It’s going to be people that are doing well in life,” she says.

This feeds into civic apathy, she says, making it more difficult to get voters in her community to engage in local democracy because they think elected officials prioritize the development of favored sectors of town.

“When you make the south side look unattractive as hell, and you completely ignore it,” she says, “who’s gonna want to come and support a city that won’t support their own?”

Public records show that residents of the city’s north side dominate representation on the commission. In 2023, four of the five commissioners lived north of Comanche Street, in close proximity to the Dodge City Country Club. After the fall election, two commissioners living north of Comanche lost their races — replaced by new officials who also live near the country club. A fifth commissioner, current Mayor Chuck Taylor, lives on a rural route along the U.S. Highway 400.

The fallout of at-large elections

The ACLU Kansas suit, Coca v. City of Dodge City, focuses on the role of the at-large system, alleging that it dilutes the voting power of the Hispanic community, a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause . The plaintiffs are not arguing that all Latinos think, and thus vote, the same way. Instead, they contend that Latinos would overwhelmingly back other Latinos for seats on the City Commission but are thwarted by an at-large system that allows white voters to diminish the power of their vote.

The Voting Rights Act is a landmark piece of legislation first passed in 1965. It’s been called the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. At the time of the bill’s drafting, Section 2 was mostly seen as a way to enforce the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote couldn’t be abridged “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Section 2 court cases are common, even ones in which plaintiffs like Dodge City residents Miquel Coca and Alejandro Rangel-Lopez have alleged that at-large elections discriminate against Latino voters – which would be an infringement of their rights under the 14th Amendment.

The large number of cases filed under Section 2 have in turn spawned numerous appellate court rulings. One famous case is Mobile v. Bolden. In 1979, a Black resident of Mobile, Alabama, brought a class-action suit against the city, arguing that its at-large voting system for city commissioners diluted the voting strength of Black residents.

A federal district judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, directing the city to replace its existing arrangement with a mayor and representatives elected from single-member districts. An appeals court affirmed the ruling.

But in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the trial court, ruling that Section 2 was a restatement of the 15th Amendment’s protections, and the plaintiffs had to prove that the city’s practices had a discriminatory purpose.

Two years later, Congress amended Section 2 to allow legal challenges if a plaintiff could prove that an election’s “standard, practice, or procedure being challenged had the result of denying a racial or language minority an equal opportunity to participate in the political process.”

Since then, the Justice Department has filed at least 19 cases challenging at-large systems under Section 2 – the same cited in the ACLU’s case against Dodge City. More lawsuits have been filed at the state or local level.

Academic research lends support to the claim that at-large systems impact representation. An analysis from the University of Nebraska found that minorities are underrepresented in governmental entities employing such systems. Research from LaGrange College in 2019 stated that “at-large election systems have shown that they are ineffective in promoting a diverse body of elected officials when minority groups are overwhelmed by the voting power of the majority.”

A 2004 article in The University of Chicago Journal of Politics found that a prominent Latino population “positively affects” Latino representation on local school boards, but that “at-large systems hinder … representation.”

Davis Hammet, president of Loud Light, a Kansas voting-rights advocacy group, said that Dodge City’s lack of representation in a majority-minority community isn’t unique.

“There’s something happening and you can’t really argue with that,” he says when a large minority community lacks elected representation. “I don’t know anyone who can honestly tell you they think this situation is OK.”

Former official: ‘Latinos don’t get involved’

As a remedy, ACLU Kansas is asking for Dodge City to be required to shift to a single-member district model, where commission members would represent specific geographic districts within the city, allowing qualified voters within those districts to select a commissioner.

Hammet argues in favor of such a model, saying that each part of a city or town should have appropriate representation in local government.

“Different communities have different challenges. How can that play out on a local level? When a decision comes up for a vote, that’s going to disproportionately impact people who are not at the table, and there’s no one there to offer a counterpoint,” Hammet says.

Yet one of the community’s few former Latino elected officials sees a lack of Latino civic engagement being at the core of the problem, rather than the election system.

Jurado arrived in Dodge City from Chihuahua, Mexico in the 1970s. He says he fully immersed himself in civic life, offering translation services ranging from city hall to doctor appointments.

He says that local officials – moved by his passion for the community – encouraged him to run for the City Commission. He won, serving from April 1998 to April 2000.

One of the few Latinos ever elected to the commission, Jurado remains adamant that the 20-year gap between his win and Nuci’s has nothing to do with procedure. It has to do with complacency.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Jurado says. “I’m sorry, but for some reason, I don’t know why, Latinos don’t get involved.” He added that most of his donations came from white residents.

When he ran for reelection in 2000, he initially kept his seat with the third-most votes, but ultimately lost when another candidate demanded a re-count.

“You ask me, ‘What happened?’ What happened? I can only blame myself. I didn’t bring back my old campaign manager. A couple of my family members and friends, they forgot to vote. When you hear ‘one vote counts,’ believe me … it does.”

He says he never saw anything against Hispanics or against himself when running as a candidate or acting as an official. He says that the main challenge was getting other Latinos civically involved.

Gutierrez-Ortiz, too, acknowledges that there is a lack of Latino civic engagement, but faults residents’ circumstances for it.

“Legally, you can’t deny somebody the right to vote. But what about the (packing) plants? You work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or overnight. When you get out, you’re not gonna want to go and vote. You’re tired,” she says.

“It’s also frustrating in the sense that we only have a small amount of the population that’s registered to vote anyway,”  Gutierrez-Ortiz says. “Then you break it down even more to the actual ones showing up to vote, and it’s depressing. It takes just a few votes to turn an election.”

Room for growth

Gutierrez-Ortiz and Jurado agree that civic engagement among Dodge City Latinos has plenty of room to grow.

It’s a priority that’s also shared by Hernandez, the city manager, who says his family roots in the community date back to Dodge City’s Mexican Village – a company town built on railroad property – in the early 1900s.

Hernandez declined to be interviewed for this story, as did ACLU Kansas officials. But in an email, he said that from the perspective of the city, it’s the geographic disbursement of Latinos across the city, and not discrimination, that results in Latinos being underrepresented on the commission.

Gutierrez-Ortiz believes single-member districts could provide neighborhood-level representation that’s now lacking.

“What better than someone that lives down the street from you? Someone that knows what the streets look like? Because right now, that person that lives on the country club doesn’t know what the heck we have to drive on every single day.”

But observers such as Jurado consider single-member districts counter to the unity that the community needs to cultivate to thrive.

“I don’t like it,” he says about single-member districts. “I think it’s divisive. You’re (elected) to represent the whole city, not necessarily one sector of the city.”

Hope for local changes

The Dodge City lawsuit is just one of a number of cases across the country pushing cities to transition away from at-large voting – frequently based on the argument that at-large elections diminish the power of minority voters. Sometimes these challenges come straight from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Latinos in Whittier, California , overwhelmingly supported a Latino candidate in a 2010 election, but garnered less than 10% of the vote from non-Latinos. That result supports the idea that there was racially polarized voting against the Latino-preferred candidate , preventing him from winning a seat on the council in an at-large election.

In Port Chester, New York , Latino voters successfully argued that the at-large system used to elect the village’s Board of Trustees denied them equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect their preferred candidate.

In that case, the village agreed to adopt a cumulative voting system – not single-member districts – to elect its trustees. The consent decree between the Justice Department and the city also requires that public voter information and training sessions be held in both English and Spanish , that any public notice or advertisement related to the election be distributed in both languages and that the village assign one bilingual employee responsible for carrying out the decree’s obligations.

The ACLU says that it is possible to draw a map of five single-member districts for Dodge City that would give the Latino population an opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in at least two districts.

But Ford County, in which Dodge City is located, has a system in which county commissioners are elected by districts, and that system hasn’t resulted in Latino representation.

Brian Amos, assistant professor of political science at Wichita State University, says that’s largely because the municipality of Dodge City is divided into three districts, which puts  the Hispanic voting-age population under 50% in each of those districts.

Amos, an expert in election administration and redistricting, has examined Ford County’s district boundaries in past research and has written that such dynamics raise suspicions.

“I used to use Ford County as my example of: ‘If somebody looked at this and got the money together to sue, they probably have a case here,’” Amos says. “So, I’m not surprised that somebody looked at (Dodge City).”

Prior to the ACLU’s lawsuit, there was little talk of changing Dodge City’s election system from the at-large approach. If Dodge City wants to make changes to its at-large system, it doesn’t need to lose a lawsuit to do so. Elected officials can call for a referendum on the question of switching from at-large voting to district voting. Vice versa, constituents could petition the city commission to put the question up for a vote.

However, that isn’t the way change often happens. After all, the current city commissioners — the defendants of the ACLU lawsuit — all won their seats in an at-large election, meaning they’d be going against the system that elected them.

It’s hard to address these problems when, as Amos says, “there’s just not enough people in the counties or there’s not enough money, until the ACLU swoops in and saves the day. There’s just nothing being done about it.”

Yet, locally-driven shifts aren’t unprecedented. Voters in the Wichita school district voted by a 2-to-1 margin in 2022 to ditch a hybrid voting system that elected board members by district with a citywide general election. Now, only people living in each board district elect candidates for their jurisdiction.

Even if the plaintiffs don’t prevail in their lawsuit, there’s hope that the dialogue in the community about it will be a wake-up call for Latinos to become more politically engaged. If they wait for others to change things for them, they could be waiting a long time, Gutierrez-Ortiz says.

“I read this article where the majority of people (interviewed in Dodge City) said (the current at-large election system) isn’t a big deal. ‘We don’t need to change it.’ A lot of comfort with the way things are done,” she says. “People get used to the same old way, and I’m over it. Let’s do something different that’s going to work … for the common good. I want our community to thrive.”

Increasing the level of civic engagement among Latinos could help make Dodge City a stronger place to live overall.

“Latinos just need to be more involved in all aspects of the community,” Jurado says. “I donated countless of hours for one thing or another. It has to come from the heart, the willingness to give something back to the community. I did.”

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