YouTube trumps racism in 2011 election

With the race for control of the Nassau County Legislature as tight this year as any in recent memory, we now understand why the Republican majority hurried this spring to redraw district lines, attempting to gerrymander them in the GOP’s favor. Fortunately, the courts halted the Republicans’ ill-conceived effort to win the Legislature by shifting half of Nassau’s population –– 576,000 people in all –– into new districts. That clearly frustrated the GOP, nowhere more so than in the 3rd District.

The 3rd District sits in southwest Nassau, near the Queens border. It comprises communities including Franklin Square and Elmont. In 2000, 54 percent of the district was white and 29 percent was African-American. Now it’s 38 percent white and 39 percent African-American, according to Aubrey Phillips of Elmont, who runs the website Elmont.org.

Under the Republican redistricting plan proposed in the spring, the 3rd District would have become 68 percent white and 14 percent African-American –– a plan clearly intended to preserve the incumbency of the district’s longtime white legislator, Republican John Ciotti of North Valley Stream.

It didn’t matter, it seemed, that the GOP plan appeared to violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices designed to disenfranchise African-Americans. The Legislature’s Republican majority pushed its redistricting plan until the courts finally said, no, district lines that have stood since 2003 would remain in place during this election.

Enter Carrié Solages of Elmont, the son of Haitian immigrants who graduated at the top of his class from Carey High School in Franklin Square, went on to Georgetown University and Boston College Law School, served as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx and is now a proud member of the Metropolitan Black Bar Association.

Solages challenged Ciotti for the 3rd District seat, and won by a 400-vote margin. In this race, good, old-fashioned shoe-leather electioneering –– and YouTube –– won out over racism.