What really irks me here is that the whole things was mandated by a federal judge. It escapes me how anyone could look at this situation and see it as anything other than a social and cultural problem with the Hispanics in this community. If you make up 50% of the population and can’t get anybody with your cultural background elected, and there are no shenanigans being pulled at the voting booth, my first thought is that you must be doing something wrong. I do not see where a federal judge should even be brought in to the discussion.

Also, speaking of Dos Equis… if they could get that “most interesting man in the world” guy to run, I’d vote for him. Stay thirsty, my friends.

Will everyone calm down here. Setting aside the issue of whether or not the judge was correct in his ruling, there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with the system he put in place from a Constitutional point of view.

Indeed, the Illinois House of Representatives was elected using just such a system for a century, up until 1980. Everybody had three votes. On election day you could vote for 1, 2, or 3 candidates. If you voted for three candidates, each got one vote. If you voted for two, each got 1 1/2 votes. If you “voted the bullet”, your candidate got three votes.

What was the result? Well for one, Republicans got elected from Chicago. That was eliminated when political gadfly Pat Quinn (yes, that Pat Quinn, now the Governor) got the “Cutback Amendment” passed by the people of Illinois in 1980. But as long as every voter had the same number of votes to cast for state House of Representatives, there was no violation of constitutional principle that each voter be able to cast the same number of votes in the election. The same would be true in this case, as long as all voters have an equal number of votes to cast in each race.