Left-wing Campaign Against At-large Elections Comes to Silicon Valley

A statewide campaign to force local governments to shift from at-large elections to district elections has reached the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, where a letter from a law firm prompted the city to change its voting system.

At the moment, Morgan Hill has a five-member city council, including on African-American member. But the city has not elected a Latino member of the council for 17 years, though more than a third of residents are Latino, the San Jose Mercury News notes. So rather than face a lawsuit from the Oakland law firm of Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho, the city decided to scrap its election system — though it is not guaranteed to address the issue.

A recent review of nearly two dozen California cities that have made a similar switch found that few actually increased Latino representation on their city councils. The underlying problem is lack of political participation, and not — as the lawsuits, and lawyers’ letters, often suggest — racial bloc voting by the rest of the local electorate.

In Southern California, the effort to push cities to move to district systems has been led by Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman, who has found the practice very lucrative (though he has not aimed it at his own town — Malibu still elects its city council through an at-large system, where voters elect each member to represent the city as a whole.)

Of Shenkman’s targets, only one has fought back in recent months — namely, Huntington Beach, which has vowed to fight Shenkman in court. The city argues that the law under which it and other local governments have been sued or threatened, the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, is unconstitutional. In the decade-and-a-half since the law was written, however, it has been a boon for lawyers — first and foremost for the attorneys that wrote the law itself.

The Mercury News notes that other Silicon Valley-area governments, including school boards, are considering the switch — though even some local Latino leaders are skeptical that the shift is necessary or even helpful to the Latino community.

“I’ve been involved with local Latino groups for over 25 years, and whenever we’ve addressed issues in our community, the City Council has always been receptive and they’ve always addressed our concerns,” Mario Banuelos, who ran and lost for city council recently, told the Mercury News. “I don’t see us slicing up the city by districts as really improving the outreach and the engagement that the city provides to all residents.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.