Monroe v. City of Woodville, Miss., 88-4433

• Decision Date: 30 August 1989
• Docket Number: No. 88-4433,88-4433
• Citation: 881 F.2d 1327
• Parties: John MONROE, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF WOODVILLE, MISSISSIPPI, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

Page 1327

881 F.2d 1327

John MONROE, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF WOODVILLE, MISSISSIPPI, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 88-4433.

United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit.

Aug. 30, 1989.

Willie L. Rose, Southwest Miss. Legal Services, McComb, Miss., Carroll Rhodes, Hazlehurst, Miss., Deborah A. McDonald, Natchez, Miss., for plaintiffs-appellants.

Robert B. McDuff, Frank B. Parker, Lawyers Committee for Civ. Rights Under Law, Washington, D.C., for amicus curiae.

Dennis L. Horn, Jackson, Miss., Richard T. Watson, Woodville, Miss., for defendants-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Before GEE, GARZA, and JONES, Circuit Judges.

EDITH H. JONES, Circuit Judge:

Appellants, black residents of Woodville, Mississippi, brought this action in 1985 against the City of Woodville alleging that the city's aldermanic election system diluted the voting strength of Woodville's black residents in violation of Section 2 et seq. of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1973 et seq. (1982). Appellants would have the court superintend the division of Woodville's single electoral district into four single-member districts. The district court originally granted summary judgment to appellees. Monroe v. City of Woodville, Mississippi, 636 F.Supp. 423 (S.D.Miss.1986). We reversed and remanded for a trial on the merits. Monroe v. City of Woodville, Mississippi, 819 F.2d 507 (5th Cir.1987). After trial, the district court concluded that Woodville's at-large election system did not violate Section 2. Having considered appellants' broad attacks on this result, we nevertheless affirm the judgment on somewhat different reasoning than the district court employed.

I.

Woodville, Mississippi, is exactly one mile square and claims 1,512 inhabitants. Black residents in Woodville account for 64.3% of the total population and 60.5% of the voting age population. According to the district court, Woodville is highly socially segregated and lies in one of the most rural, impoverished and economically depressed areas of Mississippi.

Woodville's mayor and four aldermen are elected in at-large contests. When this suit was filed, Mississippi prohibited "bullet," or "single-shot," voting in municipal elections. ¹ Further, until 1987, Woodville's residents were required to register both with the city and county in order to vote in their respective elections. The town has never included more than one voting precinct.

Although blacks constitute 60.5% of Woodville's voting age population and at least two black candidates have run for aldermanic seats in each city election since 1965, when this case was filed in 1985, only one black candidate had been elected to that post. ² During the same twenty year period, four black candidates have unsuccessfully run for mayor, and three blacks failed in bids for election as the town marshall, another at-large post. None of the seven black residents who have run for a position on Woodville's democratic executive committee since 1965 has been successful.

II.

Congress, in amending Section 2, affirmed its commitment to an "effects" test of voting rights discrimination based on the "totality of the circumstances." See S.Rep. No. 417, 97th Cong., 2d Sess., reprinted in 1982 U.S.Code Cong. and Admin.News 177 at 192-93; Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 35, 106 S.Ct. 2752, 2758, 92 L.Ed.2d 25, 37 (1986); Brewer v. Ham, 876 F.2d 448, 450 (5th Cir.1989). At the same time, however, Section 2 explicitly disallowed resort to a rule of proportional representation by race or ethnicity. Our judicial resources strain to walk the statutory tightrope in this case, because Woodville's black plaintiffs contend that they were denied effective political representation notwithstanding their decisive numerical voting majority. Confronted by a similar paradox, a previous panel of our court asked whether

supposing that the proposed new system still fails to produce a black winner, we will then be asked to continue down the slippery slope, mandating new designs which segregate blacks into greater and greater concentrations until at last a black is elected? Somewhere along this downward course, the goal of an open and pluralistic political process, where groups bargain among themselves, is transformed into one of proportional representation by persons beholden for office to discrete ethnic groups.

Houston v. Haley, 859 F.2d 341, 342-43 (5th Cir.1988), vacated, 869 F.2d 807 (5th Cir.1989).

Nevertheless, when this case appeared before us after summary judgment, we rejected the city's claim that even if a violation of the Voting Rights Act had occurred, Section 2 offers no possible remedy because of the blacks' significant majority at the poll. The case accordingly went to trial, and we review it now on a full record.

Congress instructed courts adjudicating Section 2 claims to conduct a "searching and practical evaluation" of "past and present reality" to determine whether participation in the political process is "equally open" to all persons. See Thornburg, 106 S.Ct. at 2763-64 (quoting from S.Rep. No. 417, supra ). As guidance for this broad inquiry, Congress directed attention back to our Circuit's opinion in Zimmer v. McKeithen, 485 F.2d 1297 (5th Cir.1973) (en banc), aff'd, sub nom. East Carroll Parish School Board v. Marshall, 424 U.S. 636, 96 S.Ct. 1083, 47 L.Ed.2d 296 (1976) (per curiam), which identified a number of factors generally relevant to a fact-bound, intensely local appraisal of the challenged electoral system. Congress did not intend these factors to be exclusive. Thornburg, 106 S.Ct. at 2764.

The Supreme Court, in Thornburg v. Gingles, acknowledged the totality of the circumstances approach and introduced an additional, threshold analysis to be used in challenges to at-large election systems. ³ As the Court stated, unless the threshold factors are established by the Section 2 plaintiff, "the use of multimember districts generally will not impede the ability of minority voters to elect representatives of their choice." 106 S.Ct. at 2766. Satisfying the threshold test, therefore, does not prove a plaintiff's Section 2 claim; the district court must then proceed to the totality of the circumstances inquiry. ⁴ Cf. Overton v. City of Austin, 871 F.2d 529 (5th Cir.1989) (plaintiff may lose at the threshold step pretermitting need to conduct totality of circumstances test). In this case, the district court made findings both on the threshold factors and on the totality of the circumstances inquiry.

We conclude that the district court was not clearly erroneous in its determination that Woodville's electoral structure does not violate Section 2. In so doing, however, we must clarify the district court's analysis of the Thornburg threshold factors, which is vigorously attacked by appellants. We affirm the district court's findings on the totality of circumstances test for a Section 2 violation.

III. FINDINGS UNDER THE THRESHOLD ANALYSIS

Appellants contend that the trial court's Thornburg analysis erred in its findings on the lack of political cohesion among the black voters and the legal significance of the white bloc vote. The first Thornburg factor, that the "minority" is sufficiently large and geographically compact to form a majority in a single-member district, concededly exists here. We review the district court's findings on the other two Thornburg factors by the standard of clear error. Overton, 871 F.2d at 533.

At the outset, we note that the district judge discounted the statistical evidence presented by the appellants as severely flawed. ⁵ The weaknesses he observed are particularly damaging to the appellants' case because this information constituted the bulk of their evidence on the issues of black political cohesiveness and white bloc voting. Dr. Love, appellants' statistical expert, faced difficulties in producing useful data for the court. Since Woodville uses only one precinct in its elections, statistical methods such as ecological regression and "overlapping percentages," which require multiple precincts, cannot be used. Therefore Dr. Love examined 1983 and 1987 elections in Wilkinson County, which includes Woodville. We have previously cautioned district courts to undertake "fact-specific assessments" of the relevance and probative value of exogenous election results. Westwego Citizens for Better Govern. v. Westwego, 872 F.2d 1201, 1208 n. 8 (5th Cir.1989). Dr. Love's analysis of the 1987 county elections was further hampered by results that were not statistically significant because of large amounts of crossover voting. Additionally, as the district court noted, appellees' expert identified specific flaws in Dr. Love's analysis: failure to provide a test of statistical significance; ⁶ failure to analyze certain relevant election contests; and mixing of data from primary and general elections.

A. Political Cohesion

Based on the evidence before it, the district court concluded that the appellants did not prove political cohesion among the black voters in Woodville. That the appellants had the burden of proof on this issue is not disputed. See Overton, 871 F.2d 529, 543 (Jones, J., concurring). Appellants assert that this finding embodies an error of law as well as fact. They note that the district court accepted the parties' stipulation that both whites and blacks in Woodville vote along racial lines. According to appellants, Thornburg v. Gingles, Campos v. City of Baytown, 840 F.2d 1240 (5th Cir.1988), and Citizens for a Better Gretna v. City of Gretna, 834 F.2d 496 (5th Cir.1987), hold that if the district court finds that a minority group votes as a bloc for minority candidates, political cohesion within the minority group is proven. We disagree.

Thornburg does recognize that establishing "that a significant number of minority group members usually vote for the same candidates is one way of...