Three years ago, a prominent Latino civil rights organization proposed a plan to significantly redraw Los Angeles City Council district boundaries to strengthen the Latino voting power.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund wanted to ensure that eight of the council’s 15 districts had a large voting-age Latino population. MALDEF’s proposal, submitted during the 10-year redistricting process, significant changes In all districts except some districts.
Council members ultimately pursued a different strategy and approved a map that largely reflects the current situation and keeps the district largely intact.
Now, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has begun pressuring the city to implement a new mapping process, raising the possibility that the very mess the City Council was trying to avoid will occur.
The Times reported last week that Bonta’s office, after a two-year investigation, expressed serious concerns about the turnout of Latino voters in some parts of the city. Bonta could begin a lengthy legal battle against the city if the city council doesn’t respond to his request to draw new maps in time for the 2026 primary election.
On the other hand, while drawing new maps could spark a potentially polarizing battle over political representation and provide a new examination of Latino voting power, Order may descend into chaos.
A draft legal document prepared by Mr. Bonta’s office, a copy of which was reviewed by the Times, would prevent City Council members from considering their own political fortunes when approving new maps. There is. If a map is created by an advisory committee, city council members can only reject it if they believe it violates the law, according to the document.
The two officials have previously discussed the possibility of Bonta’s team creating additional “Latino” districts in the San Fernando Valley, an opportunity for Latino voters on the city’s East Side to elect their preferred candidates. He told the Times that he had raised concerns about whether there were any.
Expanding the number of districts with a significant percentage of Latino voters will likely require splitting and reconfiguring several districts, redistricting expert Paul Mitchell said. . There is also the possibility that multiple City Council members will be competing for the same seat.
“It’s very likely that this will be a district where there are two or three incumbents in the same district,” Mitchell said. Sacramento based company A recommendation was made to the city’s Citizens’ Zoning Commission in 2021.
Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF’s president and general counsel, said it’s not surprising that council members drew the map in a way that benefited them. But he said the whole purpose of redistricting is to redraw legal maps to accommodate changing populations.
For decades, districts like Los Angeles were designed to keep white voters in power at the expense of non-white voters, Saenz said. Without major changes, these inequalities would not have been eliminated, he said.
“That’s the nature of redistricting. It’s always going to be disruptive,” he said. “In fact, this is designed to be somewhat disruptive.”
Council members have not publicly indicated whether they intend to block Bonta’s efforts. Meanwhile, some political observers who have been closely following the 2021 redistricting process say they are concerned that the final map will weaken the voting power of Latinos.
“No. 1, we would have won more Latino seats,” said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor who heads the conference. LA Research Center At Loyola Marymount University. “No. 2, they could have made the seats identified as Latino-influenced seats stronger.”
The redistricting process typically occurs once every 10 years after the release of U.S. Census data. When drawing new lines, legislative bodies must create compact, contiguous districts with equal population.
Additionally, maps must comply with the federal Voting Rights Act. The law is intended to allow underrepresented groups, such as Black and Latino voters, to elect the candidates of their choice.
The city’s final mapping process lasted several months. Civic leaders, neighborhood groups and civil rights activists jockeyed for position in lengthy meetings debating boundaries and how best to represent particular communities.
MALDEF’s plan was one of many proposed during deliberations by the city’s Resident Zoning Commission. The 21-member commission ultimately sent a proposed map to the City Council that would create a third heavily Latino district in the western San Fernando Valley, where Latinos make up the majority of the population.
The City Council rejected the proposal, concluding it would result in major changes to the districts represented by Councilors Bob Blumenfield, Paul Krekorian, Nouri Martinez and Nitya Raman.
At the time, Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez opposed many of the changes her colleagues made to the final map. On Friday, she told the Times there were also concerns about the Valley’s new “Latino” neighborhoods being excluded.
“I voted against every amendment because I believed this. [the map] “It did not meet the intent of the Voting Rights Act,” she said.
Rodriguez declined to discuss Bonta’s request for new maps, saying he could not comment on issues raised in secret closed-door meetings.
Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, said the effort to create an additional Latino district in the Valley would draw some Latino voters from two other districts represented by Rodriguez and Councilwoman Imelda Padilla. warned that it was necessary to move.
Waldman, who has closely tracked city and state redistricting since 2001, said such a move would likely erode Latino voting power in those two districts.
“You can’t move that many people without affecting other neighborhoods,” he said.
Councilman Kevin de Leon, who represents part of the East Side, appears to be leaving the door open to redrawing the lines. He declined to discuss the council’s closed-door deliberations. But he argued that the City Council “does not accurately reflect” the people it represents in a city where Latinos make up about half the population.
“We know that Latinos are underrepresented,” he says. “We must honestly and transparently consider all available opportunities to provide the critical representation that everyone deserves.”
Los Angeles’ population is approximately 48% Latino, 12% Asian, 9% Black, and 28% White. American community survey. One-third of City Council members are Latino, but one-fifth, or 3 out of 15, are black.
City Councilman Paul Krekorian last week defended the 2021 zoning map, saying it had been “carefully reviewed” by lawyers and zoning experts and concluded it was “fully compliant with the law.” mentioned in.
“Of the many citizen groups and civic organizations that participated in the redistricting process, not one has filed a legal challenge to the current situation. [district] “It’s a map,” he said.
Mr. Bonta appeared in downtown Los Angeles on Friday to discuss voting rights and the upcoming election, but refused to respond to Mr. Krekorian’s claims, citing confidentiality restrictions. But he promised the rezoning study would be “fair, thorough and comprehensive.”
Bonta began his investigation in response to secretly recorded conversations about the mapping process. The audio, which was punctuated with crude and racist remarks, showed Mr de Leon, two other councilors and senior Labor leaders making changes to the proposed district map. We discussed strategies for
De Leon was hurt politically by the scandal, which led to the resignation of City Council President Nury Martinez. He now faces a stiff challenge from tenant rights attorney Isabel Jurado, who wants to become the council’s first Filipino-American member, representing Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Eagle Rock and other areas. I am doing it.
Jurado seized on news of Bonta’s investigation in a news release last week, saying de Leon and others “actively disenfranchised Latino voters to enrich their own political power.” . At the same time, her campaign said the audio leak scandal showed Ms. de Leon’s “conspiracy to gerrymander districts to weaken the power of Black voters.”
De León, who is of Mexican, Guatemalan and Chinese descent, called Jurado’s claims “despicable” and said he has a long history of fighting for Latinos and other underrepresented communities overall. He disputed the idea that he sought to weaken the power of black voters, pointing out that the three districts represented by black city council members remained almost unchanged in the last redistricting.
The claim that politicians caught up in the audio leak scandal were working to undermine black representation has been repeatedly raised by de Leon’s critics.
Sara Sadwani, a political science professor at Pomona College, said Bonta’s focus on strengthening the Latino vote “blows away” that narrative.
“Those tapes sounded terrible,” Sadhwani, who served on the state’s redistricting commission, said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, the approved maps did not disenfranchise black voters; in fact, given the size of Los Angeles’ population, they were probably overrepresented. .”
Karen Price, one of the black members of the city council, won her third consecutive term in a South Los Angeles district where four-fifths of the population is Latino. Through a spokesperson, Mr. Price declined to comment on Mr. Bonta’s investigation.
Another south Los Angeles neighborhood, stretching from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, is sometimes referred to as the Confederate District. When the 2021 election took place, one-third of the people eligible to vote (people aged 18 and over) were black. Another third were Latino.
The district is represented by City Councilwoman Heather Hutt, who is black. Mr. Hutt’s aides did not immediately respond to inquiries about Mr. Bonta’s investigation.
Dermot Givens, an attorney who served on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s redistricting commission in 2012, said any effort by Mr. Bonta to strengthen the Latino voting power in one part of the city could lead to a negative impact in another. He said he was concerned that it would weaken the power of black voters.
Even if the focus was narrowed to the Valley, he expected there would be an impact in South Los Angeles, where the largest concentration of black voters is.
“No matter what they say, it’s bound to have an impact on South Los Angeles,” Givens said. “There’s no way around it. It just has to be done.”
