The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, by a vote of 4-1 with Supervisor Rich Gordon voting in the minority, affirmed the machine-politics rule of San Mateo County by denying county voters the option to vote on a local ballot measure to change the way in which supervisors are elected from an at-large or countywide system to a district-based system like that employed in every other county in California.
The vote was a repudiation of the recommendation made by the San Mateo County Charter Review Committee to alter the system in which the five full-time political offices are elected by placing a measure on the November 2010 ballot.
The Charter Review Committee is the board empanelled every eight years charged with reviewing and making recommendations for revising and updating the County’s Charter--a document akin to a local constitution that governs San Mateo County’s governmental structure and a variety of major policies.
San Mateo County is currently the only county in California that uses a strictly at-large system, one which heavily favors incumbents or those with major institutional and financial support. Supervisors are required to reside in one of five districts, yet must run countywide. Running countywide in a county with a voting eligible population of nearly 400,000--far bigger than even a U.S. Congressional seat--is difficult at best for a grassroots candidate.
Last year, the issue of district elections was ignited by the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury which issued an advisory letter to the Board of Supervisors blasting at-large elections as undemocratic and possibly in conflict with the California Voting Rights Act of 2001--a landmark piece of civil rights legislation that seeks to protect the interests of protected classes.
Among the Grand Jury’s citations, it referenced the fact that most supervisorial elections are not contested. In fact, the last competitive supervisorial election prior to a current supervisorial election was in 1997 when Supervisor Rich Gordon won a special election--a full 13 years in between. It has been 30 years since an incumbent supervisor lost an election--and that was when now Congressmember Jackie Speier defeated former Supervisor Fitzgerald.
In fact, the Grand Jury cited two instances when a Supervisor elected at-large actually lost the election in what is loosely defined as his own residential district.
In San Mateo County, the record of supervisorial elections is one of machine rule without contest. Over the past 30 years, according to county records, when incumbent supervisors run, approximately 50 percent of the time they are not even challenged. Worse yet, 86 percent of the time when incumbent supervisors run they face no competition or only token competition from protest candidates who rarely even mount a hint of a political campaign.
In April of this year, San Mateo County officials 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. At large elections are commonly challenged due to their impact on minority communities whose voting power is diluted if they cannot directly elect representatives from their own communities--a pervasive problem for the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.
The Lawyers' Committee attorneys are no strangers to suing local jurisdictions over violations of the California Voting Rights Act. 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.
But despite the data that clearly demonstrates the problem in San Mateo County, despite the call by the Civil Grand Jury, despite the threat of legal action and a great moral hazard, four San Mateo County Supervisors have decided that they know better.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. If the County is sued and loses in court, district elections may be in the future regardless of the actions of four supervisors.
Nonetheless, by denying voters the ability to weigh in on the issue the same four supervisors have done a great disservice to San Mateo County voters and committed the ugliest acts of indifference by public officials in recent memory.
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Comments (3)
I agree with Bruce that the vote to deny the voters the chance to choose for themselves which kind of election they prefer is incredibly arrogant and incomprehensible. The machine rolls on.
too bad balshone has exhausted his creditability with other issues - he actually could be on to something with this one.... who knows!
I agree with "kc wolfe." Mr. Balshone has zero credibility. His pals like Dave Pine and April Vargas are fuming. I like that.
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