Court Upholds Time Limit in Voting Booth

Meeting in emergency session, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Sunday upheld a law that limits people to 10 minutes in a voting booth, but local officials said that they do not plan to enforce the law during Tuesday’s elections.

“I cannot see how we can chase somebody out of a booth after 10 minutes,” said Charles Weissburd, Los Angeles County’s registrar-recorder. “Everybody’s going to have time to vote.”

He predicted that while 72% of Los Angeles County’s registered voters, or 2.7 million people, will vote on Tuesday, few, if any will have to stand in long lines at any of the county’s 6,200 polling places.

Representatives from civil rights groups won a temporary restraining order last week after officials in Marin, Sonoma and Santa Clara counties announced that they would enforce the law to help spur voters faced with this year’s unusually long and complex ballot.

Civil rights activists, particularly those representing the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), argued that the time limit is, in essence, a literacy test violating the federal Voting Rights Act. They argued that the law discriminates against voters who lacked strong English reading skills.

U.S. District Judge Robert Aguilar of San Jose apparently agreed and ordered that California’s registrars ignore the time-limit law.

However, in a telephone conference on Sunday from Los Angeles, Seattle and Tempe, Ariz., a three-judge 9th Circuit panel unanimously overturned Aguilar’s order, ruling that there was no evidence to show that any California county would enforce the time limit “rigidly or strictly.” The state law was adopted in 1919 but has never been enforced.

One appellate judge, Stephen Reinhart of Los Angeles, noted Sunday that if any county were to strictly enforce the time limit, it would probably pose a violation of the Voting Rights Act. In their ruling, he and Judges William C. Canby Jr. and Jerome Farris sent the case back to the lower court to determine the validity of the 10-minute voting limit.

California Deputy Atty. Gen. Robert Murphy said that election officials never intended to use the law to institute “stopwatch voting.” He argued nonetheless that without at least the threat of a time limit, voters in some counties would tarry in the booth, creating long lines and thus preventing others from voting before the polls closed.

The potential for that situation seemed most real in Santa Clara County, which has a record 49 items on its ballot. County Registrar George Mann said he feared that without a time limit, some voters would become “disenfranchised.”

“We’re concerned about tempers flaring,” Mann said last week.

But in Los Angeles, where voters will be asked to decide 35 state, county and city ballot measures, Registrar Weissburd said he is confident that voting will be smooth.

“Believe it or not, we’ve had longer ballots than this one,” Weissburd said. “We’re not giving out any special instructions to our precinct officers just because of this ballot.”

He encouraged voters to “pre-mark their sample ballots and take them into the booth with them, so they’ll be in there a minute or two at the most and we’ll all be just fine.”

MALDEF’s attorney, meanwhile, said he was not displeased by Sunday’s ruling.

“It says what we’ve been saying,” said Manuel Romero, “that in the absence of any history of this being rigidly applied in the past, if business continues as usual, with no strict, literal enforcement, then there’s no problems.”

MALDEF, the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society of Santa Clara brought the suit on behalf of Latino and Asian minorities.

A record 10.5 million people, or 75.2% of registered voters, are expected at the polls Tuesday, according to Secretary of State March Fong Eu. They will decide on 29 state propositions--including five on auto insurance reform--and will chose candidates from a plethora of political races, including the presidency of the United States.