Citing voting rights, judge orders halt to school board elections in Ferguson-Florissant

[Sherman A1]

Updated Aug. 22 with Sippel's ruling. — A federal judge has ruled that at-large elections for seats on the board for the Ferguson-Florissant School District violate the rights of African-American voters in the district.

Three-quarters of the students served by the Ferguson-Florissant School District are black, but African-Americans make up a minority of the voting-age population in the district's boundaries. In a ruling issued Monday, Judge Rodney Sippel agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP that those two facts mean the rights of African-American voters are violated.

"The fact that the electoral process in FFSD Board elections is not equally open to African Americans is most apparent in the stark levels of racially polarized voting seen in Board elections and the failure of white voters to support candidates from the African American community, which has essentially blocked African American voters from exercising effective political power in the District," Sippel wrote.

Sippel has blocked the district from holding future school board elections until the voting rights problem is solved. The next school board election was scheduled for April 2017. http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/citing-voting-rights-judge-orders-halt-school-board-elections-ferguson-florissant