Election System

SACRAMENTO - State lawmakers were sworn in to a reshaped Legislature on Monday, with Democrats holding historic two-thirds supermajorities in both houses and the party's leaders calling for investment in public education and infrastructure after years of fiscal retrenchment. Arguing that California had turned the page on its perpetual budget crisis, leaders ticked off a list of priorities, saying they would use their new powers to help restore spending to popular social services and curb tuition at public colleges.

When Disneyland first opened to the public on a sweltering July day in 1955, the city of Anaheim wasn't much more than an orange grove. It had all of 15,000 residents and was known mostly for its Halloween parade. More than half a century later, almost everything has changed. Disneyland helped spur a development boom that has made the city California's 10th largest. Once a suburban and almost entirely white town, it now is 53% Latino and about 15% Asian. Whites make up about 27% of the city's population.

Let's face it: When it comes to computer security, we're all slobs. At work, we scribble our secret passwords on our desk blotters. At home, we leave our Internet connections open to be peeked through by anyone -- whether the neighbor next door or a geek in pajamas halfway around the world. We forget our laptops in taxicabs, and transmit our credit card numbers to strangers over the Web. Generally, the consequences are trivial.

Last spring, the outlook for Diebold Election Systems Inc. couldn't have been brighter. The Texas-based company was the nation's leading producer of touch-screen voting machines and appeared likely to tap billions of dollars in federal and state funding set aside to replace the nation's aging and disparaged punch-card voting systems.

This may be mostly an off-election year, but Orange County election officials are busy setting up for 2002 and beyond. The ballot-counting controversy in Florida last fall prompted states and counties across the nation to analyze their vote-tallying systems to be sure they weren't vulnerable to the same kind of fiasco. California's power crisis seems to have diverted the Legislature's interest. Surplus funds have been going to buy electricity rather than new voting equipment.

Summary: One of two propositions concerning the primary system, this measure would change California's Constitution to provide that the top two vote-getters in the primary, regardless of party, would face off in the general election. Voters could cast ballots in any party's primary. If passed, the change would take effect in March 2006.

Armed with the California Voting Rights Act of 1991, Latino voters in one San Joaquin Valley farm town have sued their local high school district, alleging that the way elections are structured keeps Latino candidates from winning. As in the majority of state school districts, voters in Hanford elect school board members from the community at large, rather than from districts within the city. The suit, filed Thursday, asserts that the system serves to dilute the Latino voting bloc.

Even though the discussion of how San Diego's City Council should be chosen has been a recurring one that has continually been decided in favor of the existing system, it is time to call for another review and to suggest a new alternative. One reason for the continuing clash over the council election system is that the two alternatives that are usually debated occupy opposite ends of the spectrum and thus polarize opinion.

The city of Bell Gardens is being sued by three residents who allege that the citywide election system is racially biased against Latinos. The suit, filed Sept. 26 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges that the city's at-large election system dilutes the voting power of Latinos.