REGIONAL REPORT : 74 Cities Targeted for Voting Rights Fights : Public office: After winning a new Latino district in L.A. County, the attorney activists are preparing to challenge other communities where they suspect discriminatory election rules.

Fresh from their victory in Los Angeles, voting rights attorneys are preparing to challenge dozens of communities throughout California where they suspect election rules prevent Latino candidates from winning public office.

Lawyers involved in the recently successful legal fight that created a new Latino district for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have targeted at least 43 cities in Southern California and 31 elsewhere in the state--each with large Latino populations that have little or no representation on city councils or other governing bodies.

To bolster their cases, they are tracing voting patterns in these communities, hoping to demonstrate to city councils and school boards that the widely practiced system of electing candidates at-large, rather than by district, dilutes Latino voting strength.

Later this year, Latinos also plan to press for more Latino-majority legislative and congressional districts when state leaders redraw political boundaries to reflect shifts in population documented by the 1990 Census. If the new district lines fragment Latino communities, coalition leaders promise to challenge them in federal court as gerrymandered in violation of the U.S. Voting Rights Act.

For Latino leaders, changing election ground rules is the first step toward correcting what they view as a growing political imbalance: Latinos constitute 25% of California’s population, yet they hold fewer than 3% of the state’s elective offices.

“Given halfway fair elections, we will see an increase of 300 to 400 elected Latino officials in the state within the next few years,” said Richard Martinez, executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration/Education Project. “In the next 10 years, we will see Latino candidates ready to challenge for statewide office.”

The strategy represents something of a turnaround for civil rights attorneys in California who had not aggressively pursued federal voting-rights cases, such as those that changed the racial and ethnic makeup of city councils, school boards and judiciaries across the South. Historically, the South has been an area of more blatant discrimination in election practices and more intensive intervention by civil rights attorneys. In California, civil rights litigators say, discrimination has taken on more subtle tones.

“California will be going through the same kind of revolution that the Deep South went through in the 1970s and early 1980s,” said Bernard Grofman, a UC Irvine political science professor who is writing a book on the topic. “We’re just at the beginning.”

Indeed, Joaquin G. Avila, widely credited as the state’s leading voting-rights attorney, said that more than 100 cities and other jurisdictions have enough Latino residents and a history of low representation to warrant lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act.

“Initially, we are going after the ones that have the most severe degree of under-representation,” Avila said. His top priority targets for a federal court challenge involve 20 jurisdictions in Los Angeles County, 10 in Ventura County, five in the county of Riverside, three in San Bernardino, two in San Diego, and one in Orange.

Among them are the city councils of Bell Gardens and Compton; the Hawthorne and Oxnard elementary school districts; the Burbank, Fullerton, Pomona and Corona-Norco unified school districts, and the Fullerton Joint Union High School District. Jack Fowler, president of the Oxnard Elementary School Board, said he has been bracing for an unwanted lawsuit ever since Latinos won a precedent-setting case in Watsonville in 1989. In a view representative of many opponents, he believes that district elections would lead to a fractured board, with each member looking out for petty, parochial interests.

“The idea of providing the best education for students would be replaced by special interests and political infighting and political deals,” Fowler said.

California cities adopted at-large elections around the turn of the century as part of progressive reforms meant to discourage political machines and corrupt ward politics prevalent in big Eastern and Midwestern cities.

Under the at-large system, representatives are elected by all the voters in the jurisdiction.

Neighborhoods with a large concentration of minorities thus find their power diluted. By contrast, when candidates run by district, minority neighborhoods have a better chance to elect their own representatives.

For the time being, about 95% of California’s 460 cities choose their members in at-large elections, as do about 96% of the state’s 1,028 school boards.

It has become easier to challenge at-large elections since Avila won the landmark case against the Watsonville City Council in 1989 that successfully applied new developments in voting rights laws to California and other Western states.

In the case, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in 1988 that lawyers no longer have to prove that an at-large election system was created with the intent to discriminate against minorities. Now, they must prove only that the system has a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent.

Under the ruling, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to challenge in 1989, federal courts must order district elections in places shown to have racially polarized voting, where minority candidates have a history of losing and where district lines can be drawn to create at least one district that would have a majority of Latinos or other minority group.

Essentially, the appeals court adopted similar standards that Latino activists have used to force more than 100 cities and school boards in Texas to switch to single-member district elections. Texas has 1,920 of the 4,004 Latino public officials nationwide. California has 572.

“If you look at all of the elected (Latino) officials, half of them are in Texas,” said Richard P. Fajardo, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). “The reason is that Texas has such a long history of challenging at-large elections. That is what we anticipate will now happen in California.”

Since Avila’s success, others have initiated court action against at-large election systems. For instance, Michael Aguirre, a private attorney, and the nonprofit Chicano Federation, challenged the San Diego City Council at-large election system and won.

San Diego settled the lawsuit in November by accepting eight single-member districts for its council, which has no Latino council member even though Latinos make up 25% of the city’s population.

Aguirre is gearing up for trial in another case to force district elections on the City Council in nearby National City. He said he also plans to refile a voting rights case against another San Diego-area city, Chula Vista, if the 1990 Census shows a sufficient increase in Latino residents.

The California Rural Legal Assistance has been investigating several possible targets for voting-rights lawsuits, including the El Centro City Council, said Jose R. Padilla, the group’s director. “We want to make sure the rural poor have a fair shake in the process.”

Also, the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined with MALDEF to initiate the Los Angeles County case, has been asked to sue two other jurisdictions in Southern California, said ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum. He declined to specify the potential targets.

Although most of the voting rights cases seek to impose district elections, the case against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors challenged the way the supervisors drew their district lines in 1981.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court let the new, court-approved district boundaries stand after lower courts found that the all-Anglo board discriminated against Latinos in shaping districts to favor their reelection. County supervisors spent $6 million to defend their plan and still failed--a fact that voting rights lawyers hope will not be lost on other elected officials.

The supervisors also decided not to challenge a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion in November that ruled that when incumbents split ethnic or racial communities to assure themselves safe seats for reelection, “there is a strong inference--indeed a presumption--that this was a result of intentional discrimination. . . . State and local officials nationwide might well take this lesson to heart as they go about the task of decennial redistricting.”

A coalition of Latino groups and civil rights attorneys hope the ruling will serve as a new standard for proving intentional discrimination in political districts. “This case is going to usher in a great deal of redistricting litigation unless Anglo incumbents pay attention to the law,” Rosenbaum said.

The coalition also plans to monitor redistricting for Congress, the state Legislature and counties fashioned later this year by Democratic and Republican leaders.

“We are going to have our own computers to analyze their plans and propose our own lines,” said Martinez, of the Southwest Voter Registration/Education Project. “If all our pressure doesn’t work, then we will sue them when the data supports our contention of gerrymandering.”

Clark Goecker, assistant director of the League of California Cities, cautions that district elections can have their down side, such as council members ganging up on one member and dumping undesirable projects in one district. “It is a sensitive and important issue,” Goecker said. “I hope it is not something that is rammed down someone’s throat as a result of an expensive lawsuit.”

John E. McDermott, a leading defense attorney for jurisdictions with at-large systems, said that citywide elections force council members to be responsive to the city as a whole, not just answer to voters in their individual wards. He argues that voter registration drives and grass-roots political organizing will help Latino candidates more than carving jurisdictions into districts. “The trick is to preserve at-large voting, but foster better ethnic balance,” he said.

Latinos counter that county governments and the Legislature, for example, have representatives elected by district, yet they can still represent their collective constituencies.

They also argue that Latinos will not register to vote and then turn out at the polls unless they believe their vote counts. Latinos have no incentive to vote, they say, in areas where Latino candidates never win because of racially polarized voting.