Court Could Act Swiftly, Experts Say

The Latino voting rights lawsuit aimed at forcing Santa Paula to overhaul its citywide elections system could result in a swift court decision given the extensive research already complied by the U.S. Department of Justice, legal experts said Thursday.

Federal officials have spent two years investigating claims that Santa Paula’s at-large election system excludes minorities from political representation.

Such lawsuits have become common in California since a 1989 decision forced the city of Watsonville to drop its at-large election system and divide the city into voting districts. However, most of those suits have been brought by Latino-advocacy groups, not the Justice Department.

Only a handful of lawyers specialize in the area of voting rights, and usually they don’t file lawsuits unless they are confident of winning.

“It’s actually quicker than a lot of other types of cases,” said Stanford Law School professor Pam Karlan, a former NAACP attorney who handled numerous voting rights lawsuits across the South.

“It is a relatively small bar and the lawyers develop expertise in this area,” Karlan said. “Usually, they are successful. That is because the people who bring these lawsuits look long and hard before they bring them.”

The Justice Department filed the lawsuit against Santa Paula in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Thursday. It alleges that the city’s method for electing council members violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it dilutes the voting strength of the city’s Latino residents.

Currently, the Santa Paula City Council consists of five members--four white, one Latino--who are picked to four-year terms in staggered citywide elections.

Federal officials want the city to adopt a new system in which Santa Paula would be divided into five voting districts. That would ensure that Latinos, who comprise two-thirds of the city’s population, would have a greater voice in politics.

But city leaders say such changes are unnecessary.

They dispute claims that Latinos have been cut out of the political process, pointing out that minorities hold a majority of the seats on two local school boards.

Justice Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such an argument may have no bearing on their case, however.

“It is possible that there are different dynamics in one versus the other,” an official said in reference to the differences between the school board and City Council electoral process.

A similar lawsuit was brought by an unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Oxnard nine years ago, but was dropped after he decided it would be too expensive to press forward with the case. The next year, a second Latino won a seat on the five-member Oxnard council and today three of the panel’s members are minorities.

The Voting Rights Act requires that a judge consider nine factors in deciding whether a violation has occurred, Stanford’s Karlan said. Those factors include:

* Whether there has been a history of racial discrimination, such as polling places located out of reach of minority neighborhoods.

* Whether informal “slates” of candidates have cut minority candidates out of the political process.

* Racial polarization in a community and whether or not minority candidates have been successful in their attempts to win elective office.

* Socioeconomic differences between white and nonwhite residents.

* How responsive elected officials have been to the needs of minorities in the communities they represent.

As an example of this, Karlan cited one case she handled in a Southern state in which it was shown that a road-paving project extended to the edge of a black neighborhood, then stopped.

As for the nine-point checklist provided by Congress, Karlan said lawmakers “didn’t give any kind of point system, so it’s very fluid. But it’s an overall question: Do minorities have an equal opportunity?”

In Santa Paula, civil rights attorneys who have looked into the issue believe they do not.

“Something is amiss when Latinos consist of a certain percentage [of the population] and they can’t get their people on the council,” said Mike Small, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and a former civil rights attorney with the Justice Department.

“When I heard about this last fall it struck me as entirely correct,” Small said of the investigation against Santa Paula. “I don’t think they are out on a limb on this one.”