Civic life in the village of Port Chester is eroding.

Voter turnout is low, hovering around 10 percent in recent local elections, while before 2010, no Hispanic of African American had ever been elected as lawmaker in a village that has been majority nonwhite for decades.

“Latinos tried and tried to run for office, but we felt so discouraged,” said Marcella Kissner, a Port Chester resident from Ecuador. “The political circle was closed and no one was permitted to enter. The same people, the same families, would always win.”

That caught the eye of the U.S. Justice Department, which in 2008 found Port Chester in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The ensuing federal lawsuit noted that nonwhite residents in the village could not elect the candidates of their choice because of illegal white bloc voting.

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A system of voting was put in place that had been used to combat discrimination in the deep South and in communities with large American Indian populations.

In trustee elections, instead of one vote per candidate, each voter would be given the same number of votes as there were seats available. If candidates were vying for six open seats, a Port Chester voter could pool all six of his or her votes to back one — or spread them across the field.

Called cumulative voting, the system was a first for New York. And it is about to expire, forcing a village with growing voter apathy to vote on its own political future.

“The voting booth is the ticket to empowerment,” said Aldo Vitagliano, a lawyer for the village during the U.S. Department of Justice case. “That was the beauty of the new system, it guaranteed minority representation... if only people would take advantage of it.”

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It also captured the attention of political theorists and commentators across the country. One pundit suggested that, in Port Chester, the court had “shredded" the Constitution to "advance racial politics."

Within the village, some welcomed the suit as a corrective to decades of perceived discrimination by an old-boy political network, while others saw it as a blatant example of federal overreach. Port Chester — with a dwindling white population and a booming Latino one — had become an overnight case study of political integration and exclusion in small-town America.

Cumulative voting worked as intended: three minority candidates have been elected as village trustees, including Greg Adams. In 2013, Adams was elected as just the second African-American trustee in village history. The first was Joe Kenner, elected in 2010.

Adams recalled watching television as a child on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

“I never thought that I would become the beneficiary of what I witnessed as a child,” he said.

In 2017, he ran for mayor — an election that does not use cumulative voting — but lost to Richard Falanka, who received 1,539 votes to Adams' 482. The turnout was a record low for the village, underscoring the key limit of cumulative voting. While the system increased nonwhite representation, it did not increase political engagement, especially among the growing Hispanic population that it was designed to serve.

Of the village’s 30,000 residents, 10,000 or so are registered voters.

As the village’s population has grown, fewer people are voting.

The past three trustee elections have attracted an average of 3,000 votes, down from an average of 7,000 during the 1980s. During that time, the population grew more than 6,000.

Hispanics currently make up 64 percent of the population (that's around 19,000 residents, though the exact number is unknown, given a sizable undocumented community).

Voter apathy spans all races.

In the 2016 trustees election, 621 Hispanics — 11 percent of the eligible population — voted, up from 8 percent in 2013.

In the 2016 trustee race, Luis Marino — up for re-election and the first Hispanic member of the Board of Trustees — received the 2nd highest number of votes of any candidate in Port Chester’s history. Due to strategic voting, Hispanic voters, data shows, were able to elect Marino with little help from white voters.

The total number of votes Marino received was historic. But because most voters used all their six votes for him, the number of actual people who chose him was tiny.

“People have to be involved — not just in the Hispanic community, but in the community as a whole,” Marino said. “There’s an engagement in commerce and family life, but it stops at politics. My people don't want to get involved.”

The Rev. Hilario Albert, who led St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, a congregation with a booming Hispanic population, sees the challenge as one of leadership, noting that Port Chester’s diverse Spanish-speaking residents hail from multiple countries and disparate cultures in Central and South America.

“I see too much division in Port Chester,” he said. “We have too many nationalities, too many people just looking at their own traditions. The communal and trusting mentality is lacking.”

Does enthusiasm for the political process lie with leadership or with the voter? With the candidate? How do you fix a divided and disengaged electorate?

Those are questions, experts say, that cumulative voting was never designed to answer. The purpose of the system, proponents say, was to level the political playing field for minorities.

“We would like to live in an ideal world in which voting was not racially polarized,” said Steven Mulroy, a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. “You won’t be able to make that go away through a magic wand.”

A vote about voting

Cumulative voting was required for three elections under the court order. After 2016, the federal election observers packed up and left. The village was on its own.

Due to a complicated series of legal actions, the village’s old electoral system remains on the books. On Wednesday, what faith remains in the village’s electoral process will be put to the test. Port Chester will hold a public referendum to decide whether cumulative voting should be made permanent.

If the referendum fails, the village is at risk of further voting-rights lawsuits.

“It’s now in the hands of the voters," village officials said in a statement. "Whatever the voters decide at the referendum will have an impact for the years to come. This is a historic moment.”

For former Mayor Dennis Pilla, elections are “the heart of democracy.”

“It gives the voter a feedback loop to express their satisfaction and the direction they want the village to go in,” he said.

But in meetings and interviews, village officials worry that turnout in the special election will be disastrously low. If most residents ignore regular elections, how many will turn out for a vote about voting?

"While the state has an obligation to citizens, at some point citizens must also embrace their obligations,” said Trustee Frank Ferrara. “How much responsibility do we bear?”

Stubbornly low voter turnout

Port Chester, along with the nation, is becoming less white.

Demographers have predicted for decades that the growing U.S. Hispanic population — liberal on certain issues, conservative on others — would gradually re-shape political life. But it hasn't happened, in part because most Hispanics don't vote.

In 2016, national voter turnout in the presidential election among Hispanics was 48 percent. In New York, it was 37 percent, according to data from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. The numbers are likely far lower in local elections.

In 2016, white, black and Asian voters all had higher national turnout rates at 65 percent, 59 percent and 49 percent, respectively, according to Pew.

“Our political team has done research into political disconnectedness. It’s happening nationally,” Jens Manuel Krogstad, an analyst at the a Pew center, said. “But with the Hispanic vote, there are a lot of trends that have been difficult to explain. There’s no definitive reason for why the turnout rate has remained stubbornly low over the decades. I think it’s an important thing to investigate and I don’t have an answer.”

Joan Grangenois-Thomas, a community activist involved in voter outreach in Port Chester, said the explanation is simple.

“Many people have just given up,” she said. “They think their vote doesn’t matter, that the system is rigged.”

Sandy Reyes, a Port Chester resident and first-generation American, agrees.

“A lot of politicians talk, but they don’t follow through and things don’t get done,” he said. “We lose faith.”

Fellow resident Airam Bello, 24, echoed him.

“In Port Chester, people feel like the political process is pointless, even if it might not be,” he said. “They feel like even if they were to speak out, their votes wouldn’t really change much.”

When the cumulative voting referendum was announced, Thomas’ advocacy group, Sustainable Port Chester, hosted a voting seminar in the village. Only one resident showed up.

Thomas worries that if the trend continues power will increasingly skew toward the small but vocal bloc that does vote.

“Democracy is a slow-moving freighter,” Thomas said. “It’s not as if you vote today and everything is fixed tomorrow. Feeding your kids, getting them to school, getting to work… When you mix politics with life, something has to give.”

When asked whether he was hopeful for the future, Albert, the priest at St. Peter’s, winced.

“You ask me a very difficult question. I would say yes, but right now the light is too dim and too far,” he said.

A voter evolves

Wedged between Rye and Greenwich, Connecticut, two of the most affluent suburbs in the Northeast, Port Chester has seen its blighted industrial spaces replaced with big-box stores and restaurants.

Always a community of immigrants, incoming waves of Guatemalans, Peruvians and Ecuadorians have given the village a new lease on life. It has become a mecca of sorts for food and entertainment in Westchester County.

But even as immigrants changed the culture and dynamics of everyday life in Port Chester, their influence stopped at the ballot box.

For 26 years, Antonio Reyes, a Salvadorian immigrant who runs his own landscaping business and father of Sandy Reyes, said he was oblivious to local politics.

Hopeful and desperate — he had no driver’s license, few friends, and even less money — he doggedly chased his own American dream: to bring his family to Port Chester and open his own business.

“It was work, home, work, home,” he said. “My focus was work and my mind was focused on providing for my family. I never thought I would become a citizen.”

Earlier this year, with his family looking on, Reyes became a U.S. citizen.

As he became successful, his priorities changed, he said. Protecting what he had worked so hard for became his main concern. That meant participating in local politics.

“My dad did the hard part,” said Maria Reyes, who graduated Port Chester High School two years ago. “He got a house here, he has his own company. My dad got his American dream.”

“I’ve wanted to do this for a very, very long time, but I always waited for next year. Wait, wait, wait,” he said following the ceremony at the Westchester County Courthouse. “I can’t believe it. I feel like an American.”

In his first act as a newly minted citizen, Reyes headed for a special table set up outside the courtroom and registered to vote.

He was the only one at the table.

Twitter: @GabrielRom1

By the numbers

Total village population: 29,405

Hispanic: 18,750

Non-Hispanic white: 8,560

Non-Hispanic black: 1,480

There are about 10,000 Hispanic citizens in Port Chester and about 8,000 who are not citizens. How many of the non-citizens are undocumented is a contested figure. Estimates range from 1,000 to 5,000