Noncitizens on Sidelines as Hernandez Recall Sputters

The effort to recall Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez has floundered for many reasons, but they do not include what he would most like to hear--some expression of his voting constituents’ desire to have him stay.

Months after Hernandez’s no-contest plea to a drug-possession charge and enrollment in a court-supervised rehabilitation program, the voters he represents still have not been asked what they want.

That lack of consultation reflects a poorly coordinated recall campaign that has been run on a shoestring budget by amateurs who have spent a lot of energy fighting among themselves.

It also mirrors the more general state of politics in his 1st District, where a majority of residents are routinely excluded from having a say on matters of common concern because they are noncitizens who cannot vote and are on the lower rung of an electoral caste system that leaves a minority in charge.

The 1st District, which slices through the city’s center from Mt. Washington to Pico-Union, was created as a “safe seat” for a Latino lawmaker in the late 1980s as part of the settlement of a voting rights lawsuit. But the district’s adults vote at only half the rate of adults citywide.

That extraordinarily low voting rate, which limits the district’s influence in city politics, is often attributed to a lack of interest in civic affairs by an impoverished population that is preoccupied with staying alive. The district vies for the title of the city’s poorest and least educated area, with nearly half its adults having at most junior-high educations.

But a Times’ analysis of the most recent census data and of voting patterns in last year’s municipal elections shows that economic and educational factors do not explain the voting pattern: The 1st District’s lower-than-average voting rate is entirely explained by lack of eligibility.

Because the district is home to a huge number of recent immigrants, two-thirds of its adults are noncitizens who cannot vote. Voting by eligible adults in Hernandez’s district occurred at the same one-in-four rate as voting by eligible adults citywide, The Times found.

The inability to vote of a large majority of adults in Hernandez’s district poses a question of fundamental fairness.

As Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, frames the issue: “How democratic is a system that excludes by definition more than half of the population?”

The fairness question is likely to be considered as part of current efforts to rewrite the city charter. “Since these are individuals lawfully present and paying taxes in the city of Los Angeles, we need to evaluate whether it is proper to continue to exclude them from the process by which they are governed,” said USC constitutional law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who chairs the elected charter revision commission.

But given recent expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment, almost no one expects Los Angeles’ politicians to put themselves at the cutting edge of pro-immigrant change and approve expanded suffrage. Only New York now allows noncitizens limited voting rights. There, parents of children in school are allowed to vote in school board races, even if the parents are illegal immigrants.

“Nobody [in Los Angeles] is thinking seriously at this point about giving voting rights to noncitizens,” said Richard Fajardo, who served as lead counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund in the voting rights lawsuit that resulted in the redrawing of the 1st District.

One effect of excluding so many noncitizens, who are mainly Latinos, is inflation of white electoral influence citywide. Usually older and more prosperous on average than members of other ethnic groups, whites are a minority of the city’s population but a majority of its voters. In the 1st District, where whites comprise less than 10% of the population, their influence is especially disproportionate.

They account for almost half the district’s likely voters, said Hernandez’s political consultant, Stephen Afriat.

Another effect of exclusion is that in some heavily immigrant areas, entire neighborhoods go virtually unrepresented in voting booths. In the area around MacArthur Park, one of the most densely populated urban neighborhoods in the country, entire families squeeze into $250-a-month apartments intended as bachelor units. Although many problems over which local government has authority are acute, only two adults out of 100 in the precincts around the park voted in municipal races last year.

For the small group of 1st District activists who mounted the drive to recall Hernandez last fall, the presence of so many noncitizens had an important tactical effect.

It ruled out what seemed to be the most straightforward method of collecting the 6,400 voter signatures they needed to force a recall vote--stationing volunteers with petitions in front of supermarkets.

Political professionals with whom they consulted warned that the apparent ease of this method was illusory: They would get petitions signed by so many noncitizens that they would risk disqualification.

Risk could be reduced by hiring professional signature gatherers who earn a fee for each valid signature they collect and who have become mainstays of efforts by special interests to qualify initiatives for the ballot in California.

But lack of money ruled out hiring professionals. Money is hard to raise in the 1st District, where a third of the population lives below the poverty line and all but a tiny fraction of the rest are working class.

In his campaign for reelection last year, Hernandez accumulated $250,000--four times the amount raised by his challenger, Rose Marie Lopez, a former aide to other council members. But a lot of his money came from labor and gays and liberals outside the district who were attracted to him because he is a political liberal.

The main recall leader, Al Molina, a retired automobile wholesaler who lives in a sketchily furnished apartment in Highland Park and travels through the city by bus, said that when the effort began he believed $50,000 would be needed.

He said recently that he had raised only $1,100, plus donated office space in Lincoln Heights.

The campaign’s lean budget dictated the kind of grass-roots effort that--in poor, crime-addled areas where many people are busy just surviving--is extremely difficult to sustain.

One experienced political organizer, not associated with the campaign, calculated that the recall would need 120 dedicated volunteers to collect all the signatures it needed in the four months legally available after filing notice of intention to seek recall.

Campaign organizers had to make do with about 25 volunteers, and some of them were not very involved. One, whom Molina touted as “my best guy in Westlake,” told a reporter that he was merely circulating a petition to the few tenants he knew personally among many in his apartment building.

Another volunteer said she wasn’t circulating a petition at all. “Where am I going to go?” she asked. “I don’t even know my neighbors.”

The volunteers were a mix of people who had called Molina after seeing him on the news and people who were leaders of their Neighborhood Watch groups, which in the 1st District provide the same kind of political infrastructure as homeowners associations in more affluent areas.

Many of these volunteers shared a sense that Hernandez’s admitted use of drugs was a betrayal of their trust. “I felt very angry about it,” said Eva Castillo, a Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Watch captain, mother of three and over the years foster mother of 25, who put in lots of time as the recall office manager. “If he was my kid, I would have slapped the daylights out of him.”

Key volunteers such as Castillo felt confident that other voters would share their indignation and, if they could just get to them, Hernandez would be forced to defend himself in a special election.

The recall organizers’ most precious possession was a list left over from the Lopez campaign--in which some of them were active--of names and addresses of district voters who had gone to the polls in the 1996 presidential contest.

Knowing where voters lived might seem to make it easy to contact them. But in some of the district’s more dangerous neighborhoods, volunteers felt they were only safe in pairs during the day, when many of the voters they were seeking were at work. Solicitors were also frustrated by home security measures, such as locked outer gates and dogs in yards that made knocking on many front doors impractical.

Because the petitions already being circulated have not been collated, even recall organizers say they do not know how many signatures have been collected. But they believe they are far from their goal.

As this became apparent last month, dissension erupted over finances and over whom volunteers were to answer to.

The dissension wracked the effort so profoundly that recall leaders suddenly began accusing one another of betrayal.

Rudy J. Tenorio de Cordova, a Pico-Union activist, led a successful coup to replace Molina, branding him “at best . . . a power-hungry and obsessive person with bad organizational skills. At worst, he intentionally attempted to derail this campaign.”

Molina agreed with Tenorio de Cordova on one thing: “It’s a mess and a half. This was a scenario Hernandez dreamed of. He couldn’t have had a better deal if he’d orchestrated it, and maybe he did.”

Because the legal deadline was approaching to turn in petitions, Tenorio de Cordova announced that he was abandoning the existing effort and filing a new recall petition with the city clerk, which would give him another four months to gather signatures but render useless those already collected. He apologized to volunteers whose work had been wasted.

Many of those volunteers said that about three quarters of the voters they approached during the first quest for signatures would sign the petitions; the remainder declined because they felt Hernandez deserved a second chance.

Hernandez, who was a civic leader long before he became a politician, says “thousands” of constituents have approached him to offer encouragement.

The councilman seems to be widely perceived in his district as a man with a good heart. He is a strong vote-getter. In his race against Lopez, he carried virtually every precinct and drew 60% of the vote.

Term limits will force him to retire three years from now, but he may be vulnerable to a recall before then because of the one-two punch of substance abuse and what some say is the reduced quality of routine constituent services that his office provides.

County Supervisor Gloria Molina, no relation to Al, was the first person to represent the district when it was carved out to ensure Latino representation. She backed Hernandez after she moved on to higher office, but last year supported Lopez, who once was her aide.

Said Gloria Molina’s acting chief deputy, Miguel Santana: “One of the reasons Gloria did not endorse Mike . . . is because she was harassed every time she went to Luckys or the bakery down the street by people who complained that the district was deteriorating and thought she still represented them or knew that she had supported Mike.”