High Court Justice Criticizes Voter Registration Order

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 in Los Angeles.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.