One person, one vote. It sounds simple. But there are also weighted votes, as in our county. Each supervisor has not one vote, but a number of votes dependent on the population of their town. That population is determined by the last census.
Still sounding simple?
If you live in Delaware County for most of the year you probably didn’t have a problem with completing the census. What if you were a student at SUNY? Or were living with a family member for part of the year? How did that influence the way you completed the census? All of the census results determine the “population numbers.” Of course, some people do not complete the census and that influences the population counts. It would seem that there would be a direct correlation of the total population and the weighted voting, yes? Now it becomes not quite as simple.
If you look at a case in Nassau County there were several proposals for weighted voting which they were required to defend in court. Nassau County has six towns not 19 as we do and one of their towns has two supervisors. It’s slightly different from Delaware County.
What is the same is that the method used to calculate weighted voting is supposed to reflect one person, one vote. This is supposed to be open to scrutiny by the public. In Nassau County the court decided that none of the proposed calculations met the criteria.
Does Delaware County meet the criteria? There seems to be some reluctance for our County to supply the information of how the calculations were done for their weighted voting although our tax dollars paid for the calculations.
So, what happened in Nassau County when the court didn’t accept their calculations to reflect one person, one vote? Ask what is now their former Board of Supervisors.
Marie Van Valkenburgh
Delhi
