High Court Justice Raps Novel Order on Voter Sign-Ups

A state Supreme Court member Monday heatedly criticized a novel trial court order requiring Los Angeles County officials to deputize thousands of county employees to register low-income and minority voters.

“Who elected the trial judge in this case (to act) as the Board of Supervisors?” asked Justice Marcus M. Kaufman, his voice booming through the courtroom as he fired questions at a lawyer for civil rights groups defending the order in a hearing before the justices.

“The county stonewalled,” replied attorney Dennis M. Perluss of Los Angeles, contending that officials failed their duty under state law to increase voter registration.

“What has happened to the levels of government if we can do something like that?” shot back Kaufman, widely viewed as the most conservative member of the court. “ . . . You fail to recognize that the courts--the courts!--do not run the county and do not run the state and they cannot order legislative bodies what to do.”

Blunt Interrogation

The rights groups, joined by a lawyer for the state attorney general’s office, encountered not only an unusually blunt interrogation from Kaufman but also a series of skeptical questions from some other justices.

But they appeared to have won support from at least two court members--Justices Stanley Mosk and Allen E. Broussard--whose questions implied that they saw the order as a valid way of forcing the county to comply with the law.

Broussard noted that while state law required authorities to register voters “at the highest possible level,” data in Los Angeles County showed vast disparities in registration rates between low-income and high-income communities.

“What remedial powers does the court have when the county is not doing those things that would achieve that goal?” Broussard pointedly asked Charles S. Vogel of Los Angeles, the attorney representing the county in the case.

Low Rates

Vogel conceded that registration rates were low among minorities and the poor but argued that no one was being denied the right to register or vote. Under the law, he said, counties were allowed first to decide for themselves whether to deputize employees as registrars and could only be required to do so by the Legislature or the secretary of state’s office, through regulations implementing the law.

At issue before the justices is a taxpayer suit brought by Common Cause, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups contending that the county Board of Supervisors had failed to do all it should to reach unregistered voters, particularly those in low-income and minority communities.

The rights groups won a preliminary injunction, the first of its kind, from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jack M. Newman in 1986, requiring the county to deputize health care, welfare workers and other non-public safety employees to serve as registrars, in addition to regular duties. Newman’s order was upheld by a state Court of Appeal in Los Angeles, which criticized county officials for showing “apparent indifference” to the problem.

Legal Issues

Besides the far-reaching legal issues involved, the case is also marked with strong political overtones. The board, in rejecting proposals to expand its current voter outreach plan, has divided along partisan lines, with the three Republican supervisors outvoting the two Democrats. Registration campaigns in low-income and minority neighborhoods are seen as more likely to add Democrats to the voter rolls.

In Monday’s hourlong hearing in Los Angeles, Mosk questioned Vogel closely on the county’s current registration efforts, noting that at one time the county employed about 11,000 registrars, while now the number was only 393. Such a number was “inadequate,” Mosk said, in view of the size of the county.

Vogel said the cutbacks had been made as cost savings under Proposition 13, the property-tax reform measure passed by the voters in 1978. Since then, he said, numerous unpaid volunteers have been used to try to fill the void.

‘Far Larger’

(After the hearing, Deputy County Counsel Philip H. Hickok told reporters that the number of unpaid volunteer registrars now is “far larger” than the number of paid registrars before the Proposition 13 cutbacks).

Vogel argued that the court-ordered expansion would be not only costly to the county--an estimated $1.5 million annually for the county Health Services Department alone--but would also interfere with delivery of regular services, even though interviews and registration might take as little as five minutes per prospective voter.

“Five minutes may not seem like very much--unless you are the 10th person in line,” he said.

Perluss, backing the trial court order, contended that the state law at issue placed an “affirmative obligation” on the county to deputize workers as registrars if other efforts failed to “reach most effectively every resident in the county.” Census data showed registration rates as high as 90% in affluent areas, compared to 30% in poor neighborhoods, he said.