Texas Voting Rights Group Sues Pomona

In the start of a statewide campaign, the City of Pomona has been sued in federal court by a Texas voting rights group charging that its system of citywide elections unfairly disenfranchises minorities.

In a Los Angeles press conference Tuesday, the Southwestern Voter Registration and Education Project of San Antonio also announced that it has filed a similar suit against Watsonville, Calif. The group said it eventually may file as many as 25 such suits challenging the constitutionality of at-large elections in other California cities.

City officials in Pomona and Watsonville, 75 miles south of San Francisco, defended the fairness of their elections and said the action took them by surprise. Pomona, a San Gabriel Valley city of almost 100,000, nearly 50% minority, has had only two minority council members since it was incorporated in the late 1800s. It has none now.

Defeated Candidates

Two defeated City Council candidates and their campaign managers were named as principal plaintiffs in the class-action suit against Pomona, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

“We want access to casting not only a vote, but an effective vote,” said Gloria Romero, wife and campaign manager of Tomas Ursua, who was defeated in Pomona’s general election in April. “The at-large system is a scheme historically used to disenfranchise our voters.”

“The democratic process is lagging in Pomona,” Ursua said. “That is definitely obvious in a 10% voter turnout citywide.”

The other candidate, Joseph Lee Duncan, who is black, was defeated in Pomona’s primary election March 5.

Discrimination Claimed

The suit alleges that Pomona’s at-large voting system--in which the entire voting population elects all candidates on the ballot--is a violation of the U.S. Voting Rights Act because it discriminates against minority candidates by diluting the minority vote. The suit seeks a preliminary injunction against the city to eliminate the at-large system in favor of district-by-district voting and asks that city officials hold a new general election.

The Texas group says that it has filed 64 similar lawsuits against cities, school districts and counties throughout the western United States since the late 1960s, and that it has “never lost a case,’ although more than a dozen are still in litigation.

Only 6% of local elected officials in the state are Latino, compared with a statewide Latino population of 19%, group members said.

Giving Minorities a Voice

The district-only system, project organizers said, has allowed blacks and Latinos a voice in many cities that have been the object of past lawsuits in the Southwest. Minority communities have more voting power when cities are divided into districts, they said, than when their votes are lost among those of the majority in citywide voting.

“We’re concerned that the voters have the opportunity to elect whoever they feel is doing the best job without the deck being stacked against them,” said William C. Velasquez, Southwestern’s executive director. Velasquez likened Pomona’s electoral system to that in “some of the less civilized areas of western Texas,” and said repeated attempts by his organization to negotiate a change with the city have failed.

City Point of View

Pomona City Atty. Patrick Sampson, however, said neither Southwestern nor the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which assisted the Texas group in preparing its suit, has approached the city with regard to elections.

“I don’t believe any of our minorities are so concentrated in certain districts to make it likely that if a line were drawn (minority candidates) would be elected,” Sampson added. He said the city’s at-large system has remained essentially unchanged since 1911.