A lawsuit seeking to get Huntington Beach to switch to electing councilmembers using the by-district election model is moving toward trial.
The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a Latino voter registration nonprofit with offices in California and Texas, and Victor Valladares, a local Democratic activist who lives in the city, sued Huntington Beach in May, asking an Orange County court to force it to move to electing councilmembers via districts, as other cities have done over the years.
Huntington Beach elects councilmembers in at-large elections where people vote for multiple candidates for open City Council seats and the top vote-getters win. District elections would carve the city into geographic district and voters would choose a representative from just their area.
Those bringing the lawsuit argue the at-large method of elections has prevented Latino residents from electing candidates of their choice and has “rendered the city vulnerable to wild swings toward extremism in its city government.”
City leaders have refused demands from the group to switch to district elections.
In a December ruling, an Orange County judge denied the city’s motion for summary judgment, moving the case toward trial.
Judge Craig Griffin wrote that the city had not shown that the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project wouldn’t be able to prevail at trial and the group had shown there were issues that could be tried in court.
Huntington Beach has requested a jury trial in the case. Southwest has asked the court not to allow a jury trial, arguing that all previous voting rights cases have been tried only before judges and not juries.
For now, a jury trial has been scheduled for August.
The California Voting Rights Act, signed into law in 2002, aimed to prevent minority groups from having their voting power diluted. Cities and other local governments up and down the state have since been sued or at least threatened with legal action under the law and many have moved toward district elections.
The complaint filed by Valladares and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project alleges that despite a Latino population of 20% in a city of about 200,000, candidates preferred by Latino voters consistently lose in Huntington Beach City Council elections. The lawsuit argues Oscar Rodriguez, who ran for council in 2020 and 2022, won support from Latino voters, but that didn’t translate to winning a seat on the council.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs sent letters saying Huntington Beach’s at-large elections violated the California Voting Rights Act in 2017 and 2024. The city called the law unconstitutional and was later sued by the nonprofit and Valladeres.
Attorneys for Huntington Beach, in court records, have argued that Latino candidates have been successful in recent City Council elections. They said Valladeres “is critical of recent election results in the city not because Latino candidates were not elected to the City Council, but because Latino candidates who were elected to the City Council were not Democrats.”
Former Councilmember Tito Ortiz and Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark were Latinos elected in recent years, the city’s attorneys point out. Van Der Mark spoke Spanish when campaigning among Latino voters, according to the city.
Kevin Shenkman, an attorney for Valladares and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said neither of those candidates had the support of Latino voters and the city appears to be trying to elevate skin color or ethnic heritage over the choice of voters.
“It is far less important, the color of a candidate’s skin, if at all, than it is a candidate is or isn’t preferred by a minority group of voters,” Shenkman said.
Several OC cities have moved to district elections in the last decade or so. Most recently, Irvine began its transition to district elections this year.
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