Lawyer Says Latinos Are Not Shut Out

The lawyer hired to advise the city of Santa Paula in a voting rights dispute with the federal government said Tuesday that although his analysis has just begun, it’s clear the city hasn’t shut Latinos out of the process.

Latinos have been elected to City Council before, and one of the five sitting council members is Latina, said John E. McDermott.

But federal investigators looking into Santa Paula’s electoral record appear to be questioning whether enough Latinos have been elected, McDermott said Tuesday. “The only beef the Department of Justice could have is a beef over proportionality,” he said.

McDermott, an expert in elections law who has defended several other communities in voting rights disputes, said it will take several weeks of research to satisfy him that the city has, or has not, structured its elections to keep Latinos off the City Council.

The U.S. Department of Justice began probing the city’s electoral history a year ago, but the investigation came to light only recently. Federal officials and city leaders have refused to discuss the specifics of the investigation, but the City Council decided this week to hire McDermott to represent it.

On his first day on the job, McDermott, a Los Angeles lawyer with the Washington-based firm of Howrey & Simon, said that although the city of 27,000 has shown that it can elect Latino council members, he hasn’t drawn any firm conclusions and won’t until he conducts an intensive study of Santa Paula’s demographics and voting patterns. “I want to stress that,” he said. “I’m not prejudging anything here.”

McDermott has yet to meet with city officials and said he probably would not do so until his own analysis is complete.

He said for the next month he will work with Peter Morrison, a Los Angeles demographer, to research the city’s elections history over the past 20 years. He will examine the ethnicity of all candidates, including those elected.

The two also will attempt to determine where Latino voters live in the city, what percentage of Latinos actually can or do vote, and how various geographic areas of the city vote.

Those statistics could help reveal whether Latino representation is as disproportionate as critics have charged. In a town with a population that is two-thirds Latino, critics say there should be broader Latino representation in city government.

McDermott’s analysis also may indicate what would happen if the city switched from an at-large system of elections to a district system, in which voters cast ballots only for council candidates who would represent their area of the city. Santa Paula and every other city in the county use the at-large system, in which the entire city votes on every council member.

Part of the problem, McDermott said, is that some statistics are not available through any one agency and must be distilled by merging census, state, county and city data.

Since 1985, McDermott has represented a dozen California cities and counties--including Los Angeles County and Oxnard, which was accused by private parties rather than the justice department--in cases involving the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Historically, justice department officials have pushed cities to shift to the district form of local government when the white vote citywide so dilutes the minority vote that even a significant minority group cannot elect its candidates to office.

The theory is that a district form of government helps minority groups when they are concentrated in certain geographic areas. But, McDermott said, California Latinos and whites are more likely to live in mixed neighborhoods than are blacks and whites in the South, where many voting-rights cases originated.

Shifting from at-large to councilmanic districts may not make a difference in California.

Meanwhile, McDermott said, federal law exists to protect a minority group, not to guarantee the election of minority candidates. “The Voting Rights Act is a nondiscriminatory statute, not an affirmative-action statute,” McDermott said.