Madera Unified case is changing elections throughout California
The heavily Latino district's voting system made it hard for Latinos to win school board seats. A judge ruled it violated the state Voting Rights Act. Other cities are taking note.
Reporting from Madera — You would never mistake Jesse Lopez Jr. for a revolutionary. Soft-spoken, with a shy smile beneath his gray mustache, the retired school custodian and amateur mariachi singer hardly seems like an instigator.
Yet if Latinos come to dominate California politics someday, Lopez will have helped make it happen.
Lopez was one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit earlier this year against the Madera Unified School District aimed at greater Latino participation on the school board in the San Joaquin Valley town.
An injunction in the case is forcing Madera Unified, which is 82% Latino, to change the way it elects its school board.
The decision has already begun to reshape school boards, city councils and special districts throughout California. Dozens of jurisdictions have Latino majorities with few, if any, Latino elected officials -- the very conditions that led to the ruling that the Madera district's electoral system had fostered "racially polarized voting" in violation of the California Voting Rights Act.
"I think what we're looking at is a quiet revolution," said Robert Rubin, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, which brought the Madera case. "I think this will sort of usher in the transfer of power from the Anglo community to the Latino community . . . with fair and equitable voting procedures."
The latest step along that road was a ruling in September by Madera County Superior Court Judge James E. Oakley, who invalidated, in advance, the results of the November school board election. Oakley said Madera's 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.
Relying on the remedy suggested by the law, he called for the district to be divided into seven trustee areas, with candidates to run in each.
Roughly 90% of California school boards use at-large voting, as do many city councils and other local boards. The state's Voting Rights Act, enacted in 2002, bans at-large voting if there is evidence that it "impairs the ability" of a minority group "to elect candidates of its choice or its ability to influence the outcome of an election."
- Madera school board election nullified before the vote Sep 25, 2008
- Irony in Madera Jan 10, 2009
- S.D. Suit Challenges At-Large Elections Jan 26, 1988
