COLUMN LEFT/ BERNARD GROFMAN : Voting Rights May Be Issue in Santa Ana : The fact that Latinos are a majority does not preclude a challenge to at-large elections.

In the past two decades “at large” elections (where all officials are elected from a citywide constituency) have come under legal challenge with the Voting Rights Act. In the past two decades the number of black and Latino elected officials has more than quadrupled--a rate of growth far outstripping minority population growth. These two facts are related. A good portion of the increase in minority population at the local level can be attributed to litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act that has led to the replacement of at-large elections with (ward) elections from single-member districts.

In an at-large system the majority bloc can elect an entire slate of candidates. In jurisdictions with at-large voting and substantial minority populations, but an electorate where non-Latinos are a majority, if voting is polarized along racial or ethnic lines, no minority candidate preferred by the minority community may be elected. Where voting is polarized, the minority will usually be represented in numbers far below their proportion in the population.

In contrast, in a single-member district plan, a geographically concentrated minority group, (whether racial, ethnic, or partisan) will be able to elect candidates of its choice in those areas where its voters form a majority or there are enough voters sympathetic to its cause to put together a winning coalition.

In Texas, for example, the number of Latino and black city council members more than doubled (on average) in the nearly 70 cities that switched to districted systems in the past 15 years. The growth in minority representation in Texas cities that switched election type was far greater than in cities that kept at-large elections.

There have already been several challenges to at-large elections in California. One of the most important cases was a 1986 challenge in the small city of Watsonville, where Latinos were nearly a population majority but made up a very low percentage of registered voters. No Latino had ever served on the City Council and almost all the incumbents lived within a few blocks of each other. The 9th Circuit affirmed that the city’s at-large system violated the Voting Rights Act because voting was shown to be racially polarized and because it was possible to draw two districts with Latino voting-age majorities so as to avoid dilution of the minority vote. In the first election under the new district a Latino was elected, and another came within a few votes of winning.

There have only been a handful of challenges since the 1988 Watsonville decision. In several of these, the challenged cities and school boards chose to switch to districts rather than fight the suits. Lawsuits are very expensive to defend. The estimated cost to Watsonville is nearly $1 million. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, in its unsuccessful defense against the claim that its district lines had been racially gerrymandered, spent more than $6 million--and that was before it reimbursed plaintiffs’ attorneys for their costs. That lawsuit led to the election of Gloria Molina, the first Latino supervisor in Los Angeles this century.

We can expect to see more voting rights challenges to California counties, cities and school boards in suits brought by organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund or attorneys working with them.

Cities and school boards in Orange County will not be immune. Indeed, Santa Ana’s at-large election system was recently cited as one of the top-five targets of voting litigators in this state.

The fact that Latinos are a majority in a city such as Santa Ana does not preclude a challenge to the at-large plan as long as the voting electorate is not majority Latino--which in Santa Ana it is not. Similarly, the fact that some minority members have been elected in Santa Ana does not preclude a successful challenge. Plaintiffs will need to show that voting is usually polarized along racial or ethnic lines, minority electoral success is infrequent or limited, and minority population is sufficiently geographically concentrated so that probable minority representation could be improved from what exists under the present (at-large) plan. Recent court cases have held that districts are to be drawn on the basis of total federal census population, rather than on the basis of voting-age population or citizen population.

Not all voting lawsuits in California can be expected to end in victories for minority plaintiffs, but every recent California lawsuit in which plaintiffs have been unsuccessful involved a situation where the Latino population was so small and dispersed that it could not form a majority in even one single member district. That situation does not apply in Santa Ana. Nationally, minority plaintiffs have prevailed in well over 90% of the challenges to at-large elections brought since 1986.