San Mateo County officials today released a letter (see pages 23-24) from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, a San Francisco-based civil rights legal foundation, informing the County that the civil rights organization may file a lawsuit against the County for potential violations of the California Voting Rights Act due to the County’s use of at-large elections for San Mateo County Supervisors.
The letter, signed by the organization’s legal director Robert Rubin, states:
“Our research shows that in the history of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, only two members of the protected class have been elected to this Board, one of whom was appointed prior to her election. According to recent data, the overall percentage of minority citizen voting age population in San Mateo [County] is 44.64%. Given the significant number of minority citizen voting age residents, we believe that the county’s use of an at-large election system dilutes the vote of minority residents.”
The letter concludes:
"Given the historical lack of minority representation on the Board of Supervisors in the context of racially polarized elections, we again urge San Mateo [County] to voluntarily change its at-large system of electing board members. Otherwise, on behalf of the residents within the county, we will be forced to seek judicial relief. Please advise us no later than April 30th, 2010 as to whether you would like to discuss a voluntary change to your current at-large system.”
The revelation that a lawsuit may be in the county’s future is a potential lighting bolt that could reshape how members of the County’s Board of Supervisors are elected from an at-large or countywide system to one in which supervisors are elected from five separate and distinct districts. Supervisors in San Mateo County already are required to reside in separate districts but they are elected by voters throughout the county, an odd hybrid that is unique in California.
In fact, San Mateo County is the only county in California that elects Supervisors in an at-large system--a system often equated with efforts to suppress the voting power of minority populations. And that is what has likely drawn the interest of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
The Lawyers' Committee has built a reputation in California for vigorous enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 2001, via lawsuits against many local jurisdictions, among many civil rights pursuits.
Most famously, the Lawyers' Committee successfully sued the Madera Unified School District in 2008. In that ruling, Madera County Superior Court Judge James E. Oakley invalidated, in advance, the results of the November 2008 school board election based on the fact that the at-large voting system in which all voters in the district cast ballots for all board members rather than for a candidate representing their section of town violated the Voting Rights Act.
Since that ruling, according to a Los Angeles Times article, many California school districts and cities have abandoned at-large voting systems and have adopted district based systems.
How the County will respond remains to be seen but many Supervisors are on record opposing such a change.
The big question, however, is whether or not those same supervisors will vote to fight the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in court over this issue, spending taxpayer dollars in a period of huge deficits to defend an electoral system that has been abandoned by every other county in California.
But the interest of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights is not the first such concern expressed by an outside body regarding the County’s at-large system. Last summer, following the controversial mid-term appoint of former San Mateo City Councilmember Carol Groome to the Board of Supervisors to fill the vacancy left by Jerry Hill who was elected to the State Assembly, the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury issued an advisory letter to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors directing the five-member board to change the system under which supervisors are elected from an at-large system to a district based system.
In that letter, the Civil Grand Jury warned the county that it may be edging close to a violation of the Voting Rights Act and referenced the Madera Unified School District case ruling as only two minorities have ever been elected to the County Board of Supervisors in 154 years.
The Civil Grand Jury added that the task of running for the board in a county with a population topping 700,000 is daunting at best. The cost to run such an election without major support from entrenched political interests is all but impossible. Running in such an election would even dwarf the size of a U.S. Congressional district.
It has been 13 years since there was a hotly contested Supervisorial race when Supervisor Gordon actually had to earn his seat in a special election without an incumbent.
More startling is the fact that an incumbent San Mateo County Supervisor has not been unseated since 1980 when now Congresswoman Jackie Speier unseated James Fitzgerald.
The County may now, finally, be at a crossroads and will be forced to potentially embrace a different political future.
If the Supervisors decide to fight this issue in court the County will not hold the moral high ground legally or morally.
An at-large system of elections, particularly in a county as diverse as San Mateo County, has been compared to a modern day poll tax in the mold of Jim Crow.
Opponents of district elections constantly point their finger to San Francisco as a model of what can happen with district elections but the comparison is absurd. San Francisco is both a City and County--the only one in the State--and the Board of Supervisors acts as a city council and county board at once governing a politically volatile electorate. The comparison to San Mateo County has no meaning whatsoever.
What voters must consider is why San Mateo County has chosen to maintain such a system, protecting a remote and unaccountable county government, when no other county in the State of California does so?
The answer is simple and insidious.
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