[EL] Palmdale California VRA case

[Abigail Thernstrom]

	My husband Stephan Thernstrom, who served as an expert witness for the City of Palmdale, wanted me to pass along his brief comments:
 
	The choice of the California Voting Rights Act over Section 2 was a perfectly clear one. The California law provides more generous compensation for attorneys for the plaintiffs, and does not require a showing that a Thornburg district could be created in the jurisdiction. In fact, my lay understanding of the law is that it can be used to override the preferences of a city’s voters even if the minority population bringing a challenge is too small and too residentially dispersed to come close to meeting the Thornburgh test. In a city that was 5 percent Latino and 3 percent black, for example, plaintiffs could make a case for imposing districted elections by simply demonstrating a history of racially polarized voting.  Whether a districted plan would give them a good chance of winning seats doesn’t matter. It is hard to see why anyone would bother to file such a complaint, and unclear how a judge would react to it. But the law seems to have been designed to eliminate at-large elections in any California city with a racially diverse population—i.e. just about all of them.


Abigail Thernstrom
Adjunct Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Vice-chair, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2001 - 2013
www.thernstrom.com







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