Suit Alleges At-Large City Council Elections Are Discriminatory

At-large elections, the method for choosing City Council members in 417 of California’s 445 cities, is being challenged as discriminatory in a federal court suit here focused on the small vegetable-growing town of Watsonville.

In a civil suit before U.S. District Judge William Ingram, Latino activists allege that the at-large election of City Council members in Watsonville is unfair to Latinos and other ethnic minorities because the city is racially polarized.

If successful, the suit could have implications far beyond southern Santa Cruz County by opening the way for additional lawsuits challenging municipal elections in perhaps dozens of other cities throughout the state.

Three Watsonville residents, backed by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, charge that at-large elections have prevented the election of even a single Latino to the City Council.

“The numbers are just so glaring,” said Joaquin G. Avila, the residents’ lawyer and former leader of the legal defense fund’s San Francisco chapter. “There is a 50% Hispanic population--and no Hispanic representation.”

Vincent R. Fontana, a New York lawyer representing Watsonville, challenges the assertion that at-large elections are to blame for the absence of Latinos on the council. He said the phenomenon can be traced to other causes, ranging from historically low Latino voter turnout to the high quality of local Anglo politicians.

At-large elections--in which council members are chosen by voters throughout a city rather than in geographic districts--have been the frequent target of legal challenges in a number of Southern and Southwestern states, notably Texas, in recent years.

Most of those challenges have been successful, although the first case in California, in Pomona, was dismissed by a federal judge in Los Angeles last November because it was not demonstrated in court that Pomona voters are racially polarized.

Polarized voting occurs when voters choose candidates of their own ethnic group regardless of whether the candidate and voter share opinions on larger, more substantive issues.

Despite this, more challenges are likely, in part because of a favorable ruling last summer by the U.S. Supreme Court. In a North Carolina case, the court ruled that plaintiffs may legally challenge at-large elections without having to prove that any resulting discrimination was intentional.

At-large elections are by far the most common method for choosing City Council members in California, said a spokesman for the California League of Cities in Sacramento. Of the state’s 445 incorporated cities, only 18 employ district elections, such as those used in Los Angeles; another 10 cities, including San Diego, nominate candidates by district but elect them at-large.

Activists declined to speculate about how many of the 417 remaining cities, including San Francisco, could find their city elections challenged in court. Avila said it depends on several factors, including the size of their minority communities and local voting patterns. However, Avila did say that activists plan to review a number of larger cities in the San Joaquin Valley.

Key to any future challenges is the ability to prove a pattern of racially polarized voting. In Watsonville--the home of 23,543 people, including 11,509 Latinos--unhappy Hispanics have employed one of the nation’s leading experts on voting patterns, Bernard Grofman of UC Irvine, to investigate their suspicions of polarized voting.

In his first day of testimony this week, Grofman said polarization does indeed exist in Watsonville, to the extent that “it is essentially impossible for minority voters to elect candidates of their choice.”

Under cross-examination, however, he also testified that the district plan proposed by minority residents would be unlikely to elect many Latinos because the concentration of Latino voters in the two most-heavily minority districts would not be enough to overcome historically low Latino voter turnout.

Avila discounted that conclusion as speculative and irrelevant to the basic question of whether the present system is discriminatory.

“It is not just a matter of results or expected results,” he said. “It is more an issue of the actual political integration of the Hispanic community in Watsonville.

“Anglo candidates,” he added, “have not addressed the needs of the Hispanic community.”

That was the focus of later testimony, as two community activists, Dolores Cruz Gomez of Salud Para la Gente (Health for People) and Ernest Lopez of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told of unmet needs in Watsonville’s southwestern barrio.

In particular, they cited a need for better health care, education and job placement assistance among immigrant farm workers in the area.

And while they complimented the city on its low-income housing efforts, they agreed that still more must be done to reduce the high incidence of more than one family sharing small houses.