Politics & Government

On the Internet, Urban Legends About Port Chester Abound

A nearly six-month-old Fox News clip about Port Chester has accumulated hundreds of thousands of hits, and the clip doesn't portray the village in a favorable light.

Forgive those who have never been to Port Chester if they think this village is a bit crazy.

Thanks in large part to a Youtube video that's only recently begun picking up steam and the link-now, verify-never nature of some blogs and aggregators, the internet narrative on Port Chester portrays a village gone mad, where political correctness has run amok and democracy has been catastrophically tampered with.

"Port Chester NY Gives Latinos 6 Votes Per Person!" reads the headline on a Youtube video that has racked up almost half a million views, most of them since September. The three-minute clip was posted in June as residents were casting ballots for the first time under the federally-mandated cumulative voting system.

The video went viral the way most things do – Youtube statistics show the clip garnered little attention as the summer faded and cumulative voting became old news here in town.

Then came a surge of traffic propelled by inbound links. The Fox News clip and its accompanying headline has been reposted thousands of times across blogs, message boards, political sites and news aggregators.

Among them: conservative forum Free Republic, where posters compared it to a satirical Onion story; a Tea Party website, where commenters said it heralded the demise of the American constitution; and sites of the left, where bloggers alternately praised the new voting system and gleefully mocked the reaction to it.

Of course, it's not all bad news on the internet for Port Chester. A simple search for "Port Chester" on Youtube turns up a video of the high school marching band at Giants stadium, a documentary on Port Chester High School, and some old concert footage from the Capitol Theatre. Likewise, a Google search of the village's name returns links to local government, local media and a Wikipedia page. The Fox News clip is the 18th link on the search engine, which appears on the second page of search results using default settings.

Still, people in town say they would like to . Every registered voter was able to cast six votes in the , not just Latinos. And while most people in Port Chester would rather not be defined by an unorthodox voting system, there's a lot more to the story than the bits that are typically praised or seethed over by internet users.

Mayor Dennis Pilla gets regular reminders direct to his inbox. A recent e-mail signed from "An American Patriot" blasted the village and said Port Chester should be "ashamed" of itself.

"Who the hell is running portchester?" the e-mail reads. "Wake up america, before we are all forced to speak spanish and lose our own identity."

Pilla responds to those e-mails personally, trying to dispel some of the more common rumors – that Latinos enjoy six times the voting power of others, that the village chose the federal scrutiny, that the cumulative voting process is "an Obama minority supremacy plot." Obama was president when Port Chester finally voted, but the case was heard and decided under President George W. Bush's Justice Department, and the federal judge in the case was a Bush appointee.

Residents of Port Chester say they want others to know they didn't wake up one day and decide on a wacky new way to vote just to spice things up. It started with a candidate, then a lawsuit, and elections in this village of 30,000 were temporarily put on hold as the federal government stepped in.

While the new system has its supporters, that . At community meetings and public comment sessions, the issue still comes up – the federal government will supervise elections in Port Chester through 2016, and authorities can opt for another voting system in future elections, or tweak the current rules as they see fit. Some residents have told the board they want the village to ride out the next six years, while others say the cost of appealing the lawsuit is worth it.

On June 16, the same day Gregg Jarrett of Fox News suggested Port Chester voters were defying the constitution, Media Matters debunked some of the claims in Jarrett's segment with a post that offered more context on Port Chester's voting saga. But sensationalism draws more clicks than reality – the Media Matters post resulted in eight comments, while the Fox News clip on Youtube has hundreds of comments and almost 440,000 views.

Find out what's happening in Port Chesterwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The vote may have happened more than five months ago, but the flame wars burn bright on Youtube, and in the mayor's office, the angry e-mails keep rolling in.

Follow Port Chester Patch on Twitter: twitter.com/PChesterPatch

Find out what's happening in Port Chesterwith free, real-time updates from Patch.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here