Judge Refuses to Delay Redistricting Trial

A federal judge refused Tuesday to defer a trial on whether current Los Angeles County supervisorial districts violate the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting strength of Latinos.

U.S. District Judge David Kenyon retained the tentative trial date of Aug. 8 and told lawyers for the county and their opponents from the U.S. Justice Department and two civil liberties groups to continue exchanging information.

Both sides used the hearing to accuse the other of withholding evidence.

Months of Warning

The Justice Department, ending months of warnings to the county, filed suit Sept. 8 claiming that the supervisorial boundaries dilute the voting strength of the county’s estimated 2 million Latinos in violation of the 1965 federal law.

No black or Latino has ever been elected to the board.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, accusing the Reagan Administration of not acting quickly enough against the conservative-ruled Board of Supervisors, filed a similar suit two weeks earlier.

Similar suits by the Justice Department and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1985 forced the city of Los Angeles to create a new Latino-majority City Council district.

County officials deny the districts, formed after the 1980 Census, discriminate against Latinos.

John McDermott, a private attorney hired by the county, suggested that a trial on all the issues might not be necessary. He asked Kenyon to look at the county’s claim that it cannot see any way to create a supervisorial district of the appropriate size, 1.5 million residents, with a majority of Latino residents of voting age.

“We have tried to create a (Latino) majority district plan and have been unable to do so. We have asked the (plaintiffs) to show us such a plan, and they haven’t done so. We don’t believe it is possible to create such a plan,” McDermott said.

If the county can show that Latinos cannot muster enough voters to elect a supervisor, “that ends the case,” McDermott said.

Sheila Delaney, a Justice Department attorney, said, “We believe that it is possible” to create a Latino district. She opposed singling out that issue, at least before the scheduled end of pretrial evidence gathering May 31.

McDermott also complained that the Justice Department has not honored his request on how it believes a Latino district could be fashioned.

That prompted ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum to accuse the county of not turning over its demographic analysis, which Rosenbaum called “critically important” to the case.

Whether a Latino-majority district is possible may turn on who is counted. The federal government, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and ACLU have suggested counting the general population or the voting-age population, disregarding citizenship.

McDermott and the county claim that the Supreme Court has ruled only citizens have voting rights and so only citizens should be counted, which would exclude many of the county’s Latinos.