Upcoming muni elections to proceed as scheduled

Judge denies request to delay upcoming citywide elections until conclusion of impending trial over at-large voting

COMPTON—Citing flaws in expert analysis illustrating that voting in Compton is racially polarized, a judge earlier this month denied a request made by the plaintiffs in a Voting Rights Act suit against the city to postpone the city’s upcoming municipal elections.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ann I. Jones tentatively ruled on Jan. 18 that the plaintiffs failed to present enough evidence to warrant pushing back the upcoming primary and general elections, the Los Angeles Times reported. Jones said she would take the matter under submission and planned to issue a definitive judgment later that week.

The plaintiffs, three Latinas who claim that the city’s at-large election system is racially polarized and effectively dilutes the voting power of the city’s Latino population, hoped to have the elections delayed until after the trial. Should they prevail, the city would be required to change its current election system to one that the court deems fair and equitable to all of the city’s residents.

As we reported on Dec. 11, the case was filed under the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which states that at-large election systems illegally violate the civil rights of protected classes of voters, in this case Latinos, if it can be proven that voting is racially polarized and that candidates representing the protected class are unable to win elections.

While Latino candidates have run for office in most of the city’s elections over the past two decades, a Latino has never been elected to office in the city of Compton, where they represent more than 60 percent of the population.

Although attorneys for the plaintiffs presented statistical data and analysis from academic and demographics experts illustrating that Black voters typically cast their votes for Black candidates, while Latino voters typically cast their votes for Latino candidates, the judge cited inconsistencies in the analysis and described one of the experts as having “sketchy” credentials.

“I did not have sufficient evidence to decide on the likely success of the merits,” Jones reportedly said. “The balance of harm did not weigh in favor of the plaintiffs.”

The Latinas are hoping that the court will mandate that Compton change its election system to one that is district-based. The Times reported that experts for the plaintiffs provided evidence illustrating that should the city switch to a district-based system, it would be possible to establish a district with a high enough density of Latino voters to enable a Latino candidate to have a fair shot at winning an election.

Joaquin G. Avila, an attorney for the plaintiffs, expressed disappointment over the judge’s decision, according to the Times.

“We thought we had a compelling case,” he told the Times, adding that he does not believe Jones’ ruling on the request to postpone the elections will have a negative impact on the upcoming trial.

The city contends that Compton’s Latinos do not suffer from vote dilution and that the disparity in representation is a direct result of Latinos failing to participate in the electoral process.

Both City Attorney Craig Cornwell and Deputy City Attorney Anita Aviles said that voting is not racially polarized in the 10.2-square-mile city.

Aviles said that analysis has shown that the 2009 election would have yielded the same results even if the city had held the elections by district rather than at-large, according to the Times.

She also reportedly noted that should the plaintiffs prevail at trial, the city’s charter mandates its at-large election system, meaning that in order for the city to amend the system, the matter would have to be put on the ballot for voters to decide.

Voters are heading to the polls this year to pick the next 1st and 4th District council members.

LET THE HATE BEGIN: Lawsuit seeking election reform stirring anti-Latino sentiments far and wide (and right here at home, too)

Just as we predicted, the anti-Latino hate-mongering and illogical diatribe has begun.

In our recent post about three Latinas who are suing the city for injunctive relief over what the suit alleges is the city of Compton’s illegal at-large election system, we noted that we expected as much.

News of the suit being filed on behalf of the city’s Latino community alleging that the city’s voting system is effectively stacked in favor of Black candidates was first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 3, the day after the claim was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The story spread like wildfire on the Internet, with many a news aggregating site and fundamentalist/rightwing blog and/or message board reposting or linking to the story.

These links and repostings have drawn the uneducated, the racist, the simple-minded and the undocumented-immigrant-loathing communities out in droves like cockroaches scuttling across a dark kitchen floor. It is stories like this that these types of folks revel in, as it presents them with yet another opportunity to spread their vile, ignorant, racist hate.

We are shocked and appalled at what some people, cowering behind bogus screen names that securely shield them from having to face the consequences of their offensive, hate-filled blather, have been writing. But, in all honesty, judging by the level of illogical nonsense that a majority of the general population in the United States considers meaningful or worthy of reflection, as well as the feverish rate of cognitive dissonance that we know is all too alive and well in 2010, we really aren’t surprised.

’Tis a sad day in America. We are aptly ashamed. Don’t get us wrong — we’re HUGE proponents of the First Amendment and freedom of speech and the press. But sometimes, even though legal, certain speech is simply so unproductive, hurtful, insensitive, offensive or downright demonstrative of backward, bigoted, uneducated thinking that we believe it at least deserves a thorough once-over, a raking over the coals of reason and factual information, to illustrate that most of these folks spewing hate all over the Internet are really very devoid of any reasonable arguments and much more caught up in their imaginary dream world of an ill-perceived “Black vs. Latino” rights-to-representation war.

Allow us to illustrate that even the folks who are using the undocumented immigrant argument to debase this lawsuit are completely full of it. As to the number of residents who are here illegally, the fact is that there are still more legal Latino residents than there are undocumented ones, and the legal Latino population still outnumbers the city’s Black population.

Don’t believe us? OK, we’ll prove it.

The complaint cites the Latino population in Compton as numbering 63,400. A 2009 Los Angeles Almanac estimate of undocumented residents who live within the local school district’s boundaries tallies that population at 24,000 (and keep in mind that Compton Unified School District serves students outside of Compton, meaning this estimate is larger than an estimate of undocumented immigrants living in Compton would be). That leaves 39,400 Latinos who are here legally — just fewer than 9,000 more people as compared to the city’s Black population, which, according to the numbers cited in the lawsuit, totals 30,555 people.

And with that, let us take you on a virtual tour of the villainous hate-posts.

The Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee‘s website features a forum post about the suit entitled “Latinos gear up to take over Compton, CA.” It immediately devolves into pure racist banter. And just as expected, the posters appear to be allowing this nation’s immigration crisis to completely eclipse the matter at hand — fairness at the voting booth.

The irony runneth over in browsing some of ALIPAC.com’s users’ comments. Take this gem, for example: User “uniteasone” writes sarcastically and offensively that all Latinos do is “LOOK OUT FOR THEMSELVES” and incorrectly asserts as fact the ill-informed idea that “most are here illegally.”

The irony kicks in after reading this user’s posting signature, which quotes Paula Johnson: “When you have knowledge, you have a responsibility to do better.” Apparently this user has a lack thereof (knowledge), as illustrated by his or her discriminatory, fact-lacking assertions.

User “dregerk” picks up where “uniteasone” leaves off with the sarcasm, arrogantly asking: “And the reason that the Latino’s did not win was? Nobody was legal enough to vote?”

“Bowman,” another ALIPAC.com user, however, takes the cake for both the most offensive and the most uneducated statements, clearly illustrating a complete lack of knowledge as to the purpose or stipulations outlined in California’s Voting Rights Act of 2001.

“Somebody needs to file a friend of the court motion demanding all the illegals be deported since they are taking representation from American citizens,” Bowman writes. “Hispanic population then drops to a minority and they have no case, problem solved.”

First of all, no one has taken anything away from any American citizen relative to this lawsuit having been filed. Secondly, the suit does not seek to force a Latino candidate into office; on the contrary, it merely seeks to level the playing field when it comes to the ability of any candidate who runs for office to succeed. And finally, as a valid protected class of voters, those who have filed suit are already legally considered a “minority.”

Duh.

Wait! We’re not done yet — it gets even worse.

The hate- and fear-mongering are taken to a whole new level in a Typepad.com blog called Creole Folks, which is, as you probably have guessed, geared toward the nation’s Black Creole population.

The author of this blog appears to have no problem victimizing Blacks, whom the blogger asserts are being disenfranchised via a secret government program that, with the help of corporations, pipes undocumented immigrants into Black communities for the sheer purpose of “water(ing) down Black areas and Black political power.”

Yeah, right. The government couldn’t even get it together enough to stop the highly preventable Sept. 11 attacks, and its pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina made the U.S., for a time, the laughingstock of the world. We’re so sure, however, that it’s got what it takes to mobilize corporations to import undocumented immigrants into Black communities with the sole aim of destroying them. Why would the government waste its time when it already has the COINTELPRO of the 21st century hard at work criminalizing Black youth, pumping drugs and arms into Black communities and propagating the gang problem as a manner of staving off that which this nation fears the most? (That would be Black nationalism, in case you aren’t so polished on your Black and Civil Rights history.)

The blog post, “Latinos Take Over Compton, Ca from Blacks. Price of illegal immigration,” is sordid and fails to cite any references to back up its paranoid, racist claims that stray into a short commentary on the issue of the disenfranchisement of Black-owned banks, which we’re still trying to reconcile in terms of how on earth that issue has anything in the least to do with vote dilution in the city of Compton. But, again, we digress.

The blogger then goes on to bash the myFOXla.com employee who posted a news wire story about the lawsuit on the local TV news station’s website, incorrectly assuming that the employee is the author and referring to him as a “typical liberal western hick.” Apparently the blogger failed to notice that little bit of text above the poster’s name that reads: “Text Story by: City News,” as in City News Service (CNS is more or less a localized version of the Associated Press, for those of you whom we might have lost just now.)

The blogger then asserts that the author of the story is suggesting that Blacks in Compton are stealing elections. The story suggests nothing of the sort, and this is merely the blogger’s frantically paranoid interpretation (though, in a roundabout way, he more or less has hit the nail on the head in terms of the April 21, 2009, citywide election being more or less stolen by the current administration). Bordering on sheer stupidity, it is then asserted that voter turnout statistics prove that “many of them (Latinos) are criminals.”

As it turns out, this blogger is not afraid to show his face, so to speak, and signs his post “Nicolas Duplessis.” Some quick online research reveals he is a Louisiana native living in Hollywood whose ethnic background is a mix of Italian, French Creole and African American, according to his blog’s “About me” page.

On that page, he states: “After Hurricane Katrina (08/05) it became even more important that natives of the region start reporting and blogging in hopes of shedding light on the real old roots of ETHNIC racism against my heritage in the region and also to highlight the progress and endurance of my people. Consider myself a relayer of information that is blunt, hard core and not sugar coated — so I hope your ready to hear the truth about some hard issues affecting our community.”

The truth? Oh, no, no, no, Mr. Nicolas Theodore “Ted” Duplessis. On the contrary. You see, the truth can be supported by facts. And, well, to tell you the truth, the only factual information in your blog post about the Compton lawsuit is the story about the suit itself. All else is misinformed opinion (albeit you are entitled to think what you will) spun with what we’re interpreting as a sense of victimhood that we highly suggest you attempt to shake. For your sake, of course.

Even a post on the city’s social networking website, HubCityLivin.com (which is run by a resident, not by the city), illustrates the racism with which some Blacks are responding to news of Latinos wanting a fair shot at being elected in Compton.

Of special note is a post by the city’s Planning Commission chairman, Michael Hill, who asserts the lawsuit is nothing more than the Latino community’s uneducated way of circumventing the electoral process. All we have to say is this: Isn’t it funny how people who attempt to come across as if they know it all actually only end up illustrating the very opposite?

And this brings us to the issue of the sheer hypocrisy with which many African Americans are responding in their instantaneous assumptions that Latinos in Compton do not have the right to fair representation in the political arena because of this nation’s illegal immigration crisis. Have they not stopped to think about what’s really transpiring? The city has the power to level the playing field when it comes to elections, but refuses, and thus has inadvertently solicited itself a big, fat civil rights lawsuit. The city does not, however, have any power relative to border security or the citizenship of its residents, whether they be Americans, Mexicans or even from the moon. Does this mean Latinos in Compton are any less human and deserving of the ability to have someone advocating for their human and civil rights in a city that is run as though Willie Lynch and Jim Crowism were still alive and kicking?

How soon some apparently forget regarding the severe atrocities Blacks suffered back in the hay days of the Civil Rights Movement, when lives were lost and others shattered in the hard-fought battle to secure equality in the voting and elections arena. Discrimination is discrimination, regardless of who is on the giving and receiving ends.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be understandably disappointed and is likely now rolling over in his grave fraught with shame.

Latinas file claim against city alleging violation of California Voting Rights Act

Alleged dilution of minority group’s vote cited as illustration of racially polarized voting in the Hub City, which, under the act, causes at-large election systems like the city’s to be deemed illegal

COMPTON—After years of alleged disenfranchisement, the Latino community in Compton appears to be gearing up to assert its right to having a fair shot at electing a Latino representative of their choice to the City Council.

Three Latinas earlier this month filed suit against the city alleging its current voting system violates state law by diluting the Latino vote, effectively ensuring Latinos who run for a city council office lose to their African-American counterparts.

We have learned that a group of Latinos allegedly petitioned the City Attorney’s Office recently to address what that group alleged as the at-large voting system in Compton being stacked in favor of Black candidates. The city allegedly rejected the claim. Whether that group and the three women named in the recent suit are one in the same is currently unknown.

Attorneys haling from San Francisco and Washington State are representing the three plaintiffs, Felicitas Gonzalez, Karmen Grimaldi and Flora Ruiz. Their suit names as defendants both the city of Compton and City Clerk Alita Godwin in her capacity as the city’s elections official.

A copy of the complaint can be downloaded by clicking here.

The claim, filed Dec. 2 in Los Angeles Superior Court, asserts that the city’s at-large elections violate the state’s Voting Rights Act of 2001, which bans such systems when they are found to discriminate against the rights of certain protected classes of voters, most typically racial minority groups.

State legislators crafted the CVRA because they understood that the state’s diversity creates fertile ground for vote dilution to take root and effectively disenfranchize any number of various protected classes of voters, Latinos included.

The act allows such groups to sue for injunctive relief from local jurisdictions that employ at-large voting systems when it can be illustrated that voting within the jurisdiction is racially polarized, thus diluting the minority vote.

Racially polarized voting is legally defined as “racial bloc voting” in Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986), a case involving the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 upon which the state of California’s law is based. Such racial-bloc voting is of legal significance when the “majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it — in the absence of special circumstances, such as the minority candidates running unopposed — usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate,” according to the Supreme Court ruling.

In plain English, bloc voting is when members of the majority group vote as a bloc and, in doing so, prevent the minority’s candidate from winning. Successful claims filed under the CVRA require the plaintiffs to show that an at-large voting system is in place, that voting patterns correlate with (rather than that they are necessarily dependent upon)  the race of voters and that the minority-preferred candidate more often than not loses.

In nearly every election over the past two decades, Latino candidates have vied for seats on the Compton City Council, but always to no avail. The Council has remained entirely Black since the 1995 departure of the late longtime 4th District Councilwoman Jane D. Robbins, who was white. The Dec. 2 claim states that since at least 1999, Latinos have run in every city council election but have failed to win office.

For many, it’s been a head-scratcher; Latinos are roughly two-thirds of the city’s population, and they’ve been the majority population in the city since at least 2000, according to the 2000 census. Yet, since Robbins’ departure, Blacks have easily swept the seats up for grabs every two years.

Some of this can be attributed to age and immigration status.

According to the complaint, more than 63,400 of Compton’s 93,955 residents, or 67.6 percent, are Latino. According to the Los Angeles Times, however, census estimates from 2009 placed Latinos at 65 percent of the population, while Blacks had fallen to just under a third of the population at 32 percent.

The Times in its original report on the claim (it has since taken the numbers down) also stated that about 40 percent of the Hub City’s Latinos are under 18, while 32 percent of Latinos citywide are noncitizens. The Los Angeles Almanac estimated in 2009 that about 24,000 people, both adults and minors, who live within the boundaries of Compton Unified School District are here illegally.

Of the remaining adults who are eligible to vote, it is for certain that a far smaller number are registered. Regardless, the suit claims it is the city’s election system that prevents the politically active segment of the community from having adequate voting power.

The act permits the court to impose a district-based election system in jurisdictions found to be in violation of the act in order to protect the voting rights of protected classes to elect candidates of their choice. The act does not require that plaintiffs prove intent to discriminate, but, rather, just that discrimination exists.

Since 2007, the elected bodies of cities, school districts and various other jurisdictions have been on notice to seriously consider augmenting their at-large voting systems after both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an appeal filed by the city of Modesto of an appellate court’s decision upholding the state’s Voting Rights Act in Sanchez v. City of Modesto. It is this case in which much of the state’s case law pertaining to CVRA claims resides.

At-large systems have been under scrutiny for far longer, however. The U.S. Justice Department filed suit in 2000 against the city of Santa Paula on behalf of Latino voters there after it received complaints that the municipality’s citywide voting system favored whites and deprived Latinos of representation on the City Council, according to a cached 2002 news report originating from Ventura County’s InsideVC.com.

At that time, Latinos reportedly represented 70 percent of Santa Paula’s population.

Official demographic and population information from this past year’s nationwide census count should be released within the next few months — just in time for use in the requisite expert studies the plaintiffs will need to present as evidence in order to prove their case in court should the city chose to challenge the suit rather than simply concede and revamp its election system.

Suit could spark racial tensions

The suit has undeniably elicited concern among the city’s Black populace, which ultimately fears the diminishing of its political power in a city it has more or less controlled for decades. Many Black residents see nothing wrong with the current election system, though they have no reason to — it is under the current election system that they are able to remain in full control.

A March 2009 Times opinion piece written by a USC student featured a controversial comment made by the head of a Compton-based civil rights group that seemed to suggest something similar to a sense of entitlement. Unapologetic and blunt, his us-versus-them comment cast Compton’s Black community as being disinterested in relinquishing a portion of its current position of complete control:

“‘The Latinos, they have Lynwood, Paramount, Huntington Park, Maywood,’ Royce Esters, president of the National Assn. for Equal Justice in America, a Compton-based civil rights organization, told me. ‘They have all those little cities just north of Compton. Blacks [in Compton] aren’t going to give up as quickly for something we worked so hard for. I don’t think they’re going to give up their power over here at all.'”

One can’t deny the conundrum of a population that, after having risen to and maintaining power for several decades after having been historically marginalized, is again finding itself slowly slipping back into the minority position only to face the inequities of marginalization once again as its numbers dwindle and the Latino community continues to multiply. But the fact remains that Latinos, with not a single member of their voting class representing them on the City Council, are disproportionately represented to the extreme.

That same Times editorial goes on to mention that 70 percent of the youth legally living in Compton at that time were Latino. As those youth come of age and can register to vote, they will have the ability to flex the Latino community’s voting muscle in Compton like it’s never been flexed before.

With the filing of the CVRA claim earlier this month, however, the Latino community appears to be tired of waiting. While many are criticizing the women for moving forward with the suit instead of simply trying to get more Latinos out to vote (which, by the way, completely ignores the intention of the suit altogether, but,  considering few people know or understand the law, we digress…), many others are no doubt already fear-mongering the sheepish and poorly educated into a racist anti-undocumented-immigrant furry, allowing the nation’s immigration crisis to eclipse the grave inequities in political representation that exist and persist in the city of Compton.

Plaintiffs’ legal team top-notch

Considering the lawyers who are representing Gonzalez, Grimaldi and Ruiz, the city of Compton would be well advised to consider sucking up its pride and revamping its voting method now rather than challenge the suit in court. The attorneys the city would be up against represent nothing less than the crème de la crème in voting and civil rights litigation.

Joaquin G. Avila is considered one of the nation’s foremost authorities on voting rights issues. Based in Washington state, he teaches at Seattle University’s School of Law, where he recently launched the National Voting Rights Advocacy Initiative, which specifically aims to eradicate the issue of minority vote dilution and serves as a go-to resource center for voting rights equality efforts nationwide. Avila got his start in the 1970s with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and was part of the legal team that victoriously represented Enrique Sanchez, et al., before the appellate court in Sanchez v. City of Modesto, the case that paved the way for the Compton claim.

The trio is additionally being represented by AV-rated attorney Gay Crosthwait Grunfeld and Blake Thompson of Rosen, Bien & Galvan LLP, a San Francisco-based law firm. According to its website, the firm specializes in civil trial, civil and criminal appellate and U.S. Supreme Court cases, with the first of its seven primary emphases lying in constitutional and civil rights cases seeking to remedy large scale systemic rights violations.

As for the city’s stance on the issue, as usual, it is remaining silent. City Attorney Craig Cornwell declined to comment on the suit, the Times reported last week.

If the city were to fight the suit and lose, which, based on case law, is likely, it would be forced to change its voting system and be required to pay the defendants’ legal fees, which would include any number of costly experts to conduct the requisite studies to prove voting in Compton is, as the claim asserts, racially polarized.

The city of Modesto is reported to have paid $1.7 million to its attorneys and $3 million to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. The case never even went to trial, though it did get litigated through the appeals courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

In another case involving the Madera Unified School District, the institute states that the initial litigation fee demand was $1.2 million even though the litigation was uncontested and only really active for roughly six weeks.

In light of the city’s ongoing fiscal problems, it is doubtful it can afford to attempt a challenge to the claim.

Stay tuned, as we plan to continue digging deeper into this tender morsel of civil rights litigation that appears to have many in the city nervous. It very well could be the first of many similar legal actions seeking to address long-documented discrimination against the Spanish-speaking population in Compton.

Among the topics we plan to tackle are painting a clearer picture of who the three women named as plaintiffs are and extrapolate on why we believe they were likely strategically selected to represent the protected class in the suit, which appears to have been a long time in the making.

We also plan to take a closer look at the pros and cons of district-based elections, which, while more fair than at-large systems, still allow for slight inequities. Several more modern, progressive and inherently fair systems based on proportional representation will be discussed in detail as alternatives.