Robert Rubin

Robert Rubin

From the Los Angeles Times:

Opening a new front on efforts to improve minority representation on local elected boards,  attorneys  representing several Latino citizens have accused the Coachella Valley Water District of violating the California Voting Rights Act.

In a letter delivered Monday to John Powell, the district’s board president, lawyers Robert Rubin and Megan Beaman said the district’s  at-large election system “dilutes the ability of Latino constituents to elect candidates of their choice to the board or to influence the outcome of board elections.” 

The letter asks the district to switch to a system of electing board members by geographic district or “other lawful system” or be sued.

Though the sprawling district has large numbers of Latino residents, the Coachella Water District’s board members all are white. 

You can read the rest of the article here. Perhaps this will wake up the inhabitants of political La-La Land — primarily my fellow Orange County Republicans — who do not think the Left is going to use CVRA as a tool to litigate their way electoral gains in Orange County local government that they are unable to gain at the ballot box.

As readers may know, Mr. Rubin is one of the lawyers working on the ACLU/Jose Moreno lawsuit against the City of Anaheim which seeks to impose on the people of Anaheim something for which they have not asked: single-member council districts.

Here’s my question for Mr. Rubin: why have you not filed a CVRA lawsuit against the Anaheim City School District?

Few Latinos have been elected to the ACSD Board of Education, despite representing a population that is significantly more Latino than the City of Anaheim’s. 64% of ACSD residents are Latino, as are 86.3% of the students.

The ACSD Board of Education recently took up the issue of by-district elections and the CVRA, and declined to take any action.

Rubin has been using CVRA up and down the state as a club to bludgeon school districts into adopting single-member district elections. Why not go after Anaheim City School District if he believes Anaheim Latinos are being disenfranchised?

Oh wait — maybe it’s because the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the City of Anaheim is Dr. Jose Moreno, a member of the ACSD Board of Education and twice elected to that body in at-large elections. The part of Anaheim in which Dr. Moreno resides isn’t particularly Latino, so this might be an instance in which vote dilution ain’t such a bad thing.