Ban of At-Large City Elections Rejected

In a case with potentially wide significance for California, a federal judge has declined to bar at-large elections in Watsonville, even though he concluded that local politics in that Santa Cruz County farm town had been polarized along racial lines.

In a ruling handed down late Friday in San Jose but not widely available until Monday, U.S. District Judge William A. Ingram decided Watsonville’s at-large elections--the same process used in 417 of California’s 445 cities--do not violate the federal Voting Rights Act.

Primarily, he found “no proven legacy of discrimination . . . no evidence of racial appeal, whether subtle or overt, in political campaigns.” He also found no evidence that the district elections sought by plaintiffs would be more likely to result in equitable Latino representation on the City Council.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they may appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals here.

The 1980 Census shows that there are more Latinos than Anglos among Watsonville’s 23,543 residents, but there has never been a Latino member of the City Council. Leaders of the Latino community there sued the city, charging that its at-large election system effectively diluted votes from the Latino community.

The plaintiffs, three Watsonville residents, sought to have the city divided into districts. Two of the five districts would have sizable Latino majorities.

Political scientist Bernard Grofman of the University of California, Irvine, testified that Watsonville voters are racially polarized--that is, they choose candidates of their own ethnic background regardless of the candidate’s positions on more substantive issues. Political polarization has been a key point in past rulings against at-large elections.

But Grofman testified that the districts proposed by local Latinos were unlikely to result in Latinos being elected because of historically low turnout among Latino voters.

This weighed heavily in Ingram’s thinking. “I find no significant number of eligible Hispanics have voted in the elections under consideration,” he wrote in his 22-page decision, “and therefore that political cohesiveness based upon (racial) polarization alone has not been demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence.”

The judge added that, despite the disproportionately small number of Latinos employed by the city, “it appears that Watsonville has been singularly free of overt discrimination against Hispanics or any other group.”

Plaintiffs in this case were supported by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and by the Southwest Voter Registration and Educational Project, both of which have successfully challenged at-large elections in a number of Southern and Southwestern states recently.