Council Balks at Election Reform Plan : Voting: Proposal to elect members by district rather than citywide fails to make ballot. Critics say city system is vulnerable to legal challenges.

Despite strong evidence that Santa Monica’s method of electing the City Council deprives the city’s sizable Latino community of political representation, the council on Tuesday balked at a chance to initiate major reforms.

The panel voted 4 to 3 against placing a measure on the November ballot that would have allowed voters to decide whether to scrap the 46-year-old system of citywide council elections in favor electing council members from the city’s seven geographically defined neighborhoods.

Critics of the decision warned that the council is leaving the city vulnerable to legal challenges under the federal Voting Rights Act.

Councilmen Tony Vazquez and Robert T. Holbrook and Mayor Ken Genser voted in favor of district elections, which have been endorsed nationally by the NAACP and by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) as promoting minority representation.

But the remaining members of the council, several of whom were elected on a citywide rent-control slate, expressed fears that a district system with its narrow neighborhood perspective would be ill-suited to a city renowned for the broad scope and progressivism of its politics.

“It’s the parochialism that bothers me,” Councilman Herb Katz said.

Having dispatched with districts, the council then agreed to pursue more information on hybrid systems, a term for any number of schemes by which some candidates run citywide and others are elected from districts.

But even adoption of a hybrid may not be sufficient to dispel the legal cloud hovering over the city because of its adoption in 1946 of the current system.

A Caltech history professor retained by the city’s Charter Review Commission has indicated in a report that the system may have been established in part to thwart the influence of the city’s Pico neighborhood, which in the 1940s was experiencing a large influx of blacks but is now predominantly Latino.

MALDEF attorney Richard Fajardo told the council Tuesday night that any reform short of straight district elections could leave the city open to costly litigation from the Pico neighborhood, which has never sent one of its residents to the City Council.

Moreover, he warned that weaker reforms such as a hybrid system could actually work against the city in court if a lawsuit were brought.

“The question always arises: You recognize you have a bad system but you’re not willing to make a complete change,” Fajardo said.

Fajardo added that the recent election of Vazquez, a Latino, to the council would not, to a court, negate a “fatal defect” in a system established to thwart minority voices.

In voting to pursue more information on hybrid systems, the council soundly rejected the recommendation of the 15-member council-appointed Charter Review Commission to implement a complicated system called Single Transferable Vote.

That method, currently in use in Cambridge, Mass., allows voters to rank candidates by order of preference, after which votes not needed by the top vote-getter are redistributed to other candidates.

The system is touted for giving representation to an array of interests, but the council was put off by its complexity, and it was clear that even the charter commission was far from united behind it. At least five commissioners favored district elections and backed the single transferable vote system only when it became clear that they would not prevail.

Commissioner Herman Rosenstein was especially critical of the system, noting that Cambridge has problems with it.

“Cambridge is the seat of MIT,” he said, referring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If MIT can’t correct it, who can?”