Study Finds Fault in Election Method : Government: The city’s at-large system of voting for council members could be vulnerable to a lawsuit on the grounds that it thwarts the influence of minorities.

The year is 1946, and Santa Monica is in transition.

Its days as a quiet, turn-of-the-century beach village are long gone. Its emergence as a national beacon of progressive liberalism is far in the future.

What exists is a growing town whose minority population has risen by 69% during World War II, a trend much on the minds of the community’s white--and increasingly wary--leadership.

That November, Santa Monicans reject a plan to elect City Council members from districts, a decision that essentially leaves the city’s largest minority neighborhood without political representation. Instead, they adopt a system of at-large elections by which seven council members are chosen from throughout the city.

Now, almost a half century later, that vote is coming back to haunt Santa Monica, exposing one of America’s most tolerant cities to the possibility of a costly discrimination suit and pitting the interests of the powerful citywide rent control lobby against those who argue for greater neighborhood representation.

A study by J. Morgan Kousser, a voting-rights expert retained by the city’s Charter Review Commission, shows that Santa Monica’s method of electing council members could be vulnerable to a legal challenge on the grounds that it was established to thwart the influence of minorities.

Kousser, a Caltech history professor, also warns that municipalities forced to defend themselves against complex specialized claims based on the federal Voting Rights Act are often required to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for outside legal help.

“Even if you win, it costs,” he said.

Adding a sense of urgency to Kousser’s historical diggings is the fact that while the council currently has one Latino member, Tony Vazquez, no one has ever been elected from the city’s most racially diverse area, the Pico neighborhood.

“It’s still a system arguably disadvantageous to minorities,” Kousser said.

His findings are detailed in a 27-page report submitted to the 15-member Charter Review Commission, which is reviewing various aspects of the City Charter, including the electoral system, and is expected to present its finding to the City Council next month.

Kousser and city officials emphasize that the study, which relies heavily on back issues of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook (now known simply as The Outlook), is not meant as conclusive evidence that Santa Monica is violating the law.

The Outlook, said Assistant City Attorney Joseph Lawrence, “is not the official government of the city of Santa Monica.”

Nevertheless, Lawrence acknowledged that Kousser’s findings raise questions. “It’s not an insignificant thing he has told the charter commission,” Lawrence said.

Federal courts have consistently overturned at-large systems that deprived minority candidates of a fair chance to win elections. In California, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down such a system in Watsonville in 1988, and in 1990 a federal judge ordered the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to redraw its districts on the grounds that the old boundaries illegally discriminated against Latinos.

In Santa Monica, the charter commission is in broad agreement that the current electoral system should be scrapped, but after a year of monthly and sometimes twice-monthly meetings, it has been unable to agree on an alternative.

In a recent straw vote, the commission backed the concept of proportional representation, a general description for any number of complex, at-large schemes that call for voters to rank candidates by order of preference.

For example, voters might be given a number of votes based on the number of open seats, then be free to distribute those votes to one or several candidates in any manner they wish. A system of election by council districts, though endorsed by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People as the most equitable means of giving minority neighborhoods a voice, has received the support of only five of 15 commission members, some of whom criticized their fellow panelists for failing to grasp the issue as one of basic fairness.

“I don’t think any progress has been made to convince . . . people that district elections are the way to go,” said Commissioner Stephen Alpert, a proponent of districts. “I feel very disenchanted.”

Herman Rosenstein, another commissioner who advocates district elections, said such a system would reduce the impact of citywide slates, force candidates to respond to a broad range of neighborhood concerns and reduce the cost of running for office.

But City Council members--five of whom are backed by Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, the city’s powerful rent control organization--seem generally reluctant to embrace districts, Mayor Ken Genser and Councilman Vazquez being the exceptions.

“I would stand the most to lose from all this,” Vazquez said, “but the issue is to set up an institution for neighborhoods to be able to elect local representation.”

Councilman Dennis Zane, an influential member of SMRR-backed council majority, argued that the Pico neighborhood already is represented on the council “to the extent that the dominant issue in their lives is the ability to keep their homes.”

Zane added, however, that he is interested in a hybrid system of representation in which some members would be elected by district and others at large.

Councilwoman Judy Abdo, also a member of the rent-control majority, was noncommittal. “I am interested in understanding the other (non-district) options,” she said.

Councilman Herb Katz, who is not affiliated with SMRR, dismissed district elections as inappropriate in a geographically small city whose neighborhoods have more similarities than differences.

He said he is leaning toward the idea of requiring council members to live in specified districts but campaign for votes citywide.

Councilman Kelly Olsen, a SMRR member, predicted “hanky-panky” if a district system were adopted. In particular, he expressed concern that members could band together to place undesirable projects into the districts of other members--a practice that, Vazquez claims, occurs already.

“Everything’s getting dumped in the Pico neighborhood,” he said.

The city manager’s office says it has no income data for the district, described in the 1990 U.S. Census as the area extending east of Lincoln Boulevard between Pico and Santa Monica boulevards.

Of the district’s 17,185 people, 56.5% are Latino, black or Asian, according to the census. The largest minority group is Latinos, representing 36% of the population or 6,187 people.

A UCLA demographer has told the commission that the area would form a logical district in a seven-district city, but skeptics suggest that such a plan would be obsolete in a city driven less by the politics of race than by a desire to protect geographically dispersed minorities and subgroups such as homosexuals, the disabled, the elderly and, of course, renters.

Other observers say that rent control--and the dominance of SMRR--are likely to remain the central facts of political life and City Council elections in Santa Monica, regardless of the political system adopted.

Referring to Vazquez’s Latino heritage, Commissioner Peggy Lyons, who is black, said of Vazquez’s 1990 election: “He could have been green, purple, chartreuse or anything because he had the backing of SMRR.”

The concept of charter reform surfaced in Santa Monica twice in the 1970s, but been a dormant issue during the ‘80s. Two years ago, the council considered, then rejected, a proposal to place a charter reform measure on the ballot.

Whatever the outcome of the current discussions, the debate is occurring in a climate markedly different from 1946, when gross racial stereotypes and overt discrimination were the accepted norm.

Kousser’s study notes that The Outlook was routinely running an editorial cartoon titled “The Little Savage,” which depicted a big-lipped, bare-chested native with a stick through his nose.

In patronizing fashion, the newspaper opposed a district system on the grounds that minorities would be best served by coalescing behind “liberal-minded persons who are not compelled to play peanut politics.”

That no minorities were elected to either the City Council or the school board that year is only one of many examples of discrimination documented in a study that at times reads like a mid-century profile of rural Alabama or Mississippi.

“Now,” said Kousser, “we’ve realized California is not all that different from the South.”