San Luis Obispo City Council’s timing was stunning

November 27, 2024

OPINION by RICHARD SCHMIDT

Just days after a national election in which there was great concern regarding politicians’ altering the rules of voting to achieve changes in electoral outcomes, the City of San Luis Obispo announced it was limiting our vote in order to achieve changes in electoral outcomes.

The change was a fait accompli. We the people had never been informed it was being negotiated behind closed doors, nor had our city council ever opened up the discussion of changing our election procedure for our participation. Instead it spent nearly two years shaping the change in secret meetings with lawyers none of whom vote in our city.

Sure, there would be a public hearing in a few days’ time at which we the people could say whatever we liked, but it was a charade, the staff report told us in advance, because the fix was in. Whatever we said didn’t matter.

And sure enough, at that public hearing the city council did exactly as the staff report directed: they took public testimony, and ignored all requests for public participation in shaping our elections, having already, in their secret meetings, rejected all alternatives to what they wanted.

So, what’s the change? At present we have a five member city council, with one member being an elected mayor, and two other members elected at large from the city in alternate elections to four year terms. We get to vote for each open council seat – i.e., each voter gets two council votes.

Under the new system imposed by our city council without democratic involvement each voter will get only one vote to cast for two council seats. The city describes this electoral “improvement” as “Citywide Single Vote.”

Why would they do that? To settle a threatened lawsuit under the state voting rights act.

The threat alleges the city inhibits Hispanic electoral success by having city-wide at-large elections, and demands district elections as a remedy. This is standard boiler plate for the out-of-town attorney who filed this complaint, who makes this claim with frequency to school districts, cities, and the like, most of whom roll over and institute district elections after paying him a settlement fee. SLO is paying him $75,000.

District elections in SLO would actually be wonderful for we the people. At present, with at-large city-wide voting, the same old developer/downtown business/bike fanatic bloc controls everything, election after election.

That’s the point of city-wide at-large voting – to keep control as it is and not threaten it with democratic challenges or uppity council members. So we end up with the mal-representation we’ve got today with all five council members residing in the southern sectors of the city, and not a single one in the neighborhoods north of downtown and across the freeway along both sides of Foothill Boulevard.

And that matters, as residents of the Anholm district have found out with that bloc’s ramming neighborhood-disruptive inappropriately designed unsafe bikeways through their neighborhood, while having such inaccurate understanding of the neighborhood as to misname the bikeway “The North Chorro Neighborhood Greenway” when North Chorro is the name of a street north of Foothill that doesn’t figure in the bikeway.

When this name was proposed by a particularly arrogant now-former council member, she said the name was right because “that’s exactly what it is and where it is,” and none of the other council members knew enough to say “not so.”

District elections could change things. Each district would be represented, which would mean the developer/business block could not run roughshod without constituent opposition. Campaigning would change: a smaller district would encourage retail campaigning, like going door to door, and make useless expensive stuff like media advertising and city-wide mailers.

Voters could elect representatives who would give voice to their concerns. This would be healthy for democracy and for our city. And it would improve diversity of thinking on the council, improving diversity being one of the city’s claimed major goals.

But the city was hell-bent on not having district elections for precisely the reasons they’re desirable. They went to great lengths on this count – even alleging that districts might result in “unqualified” persons getting elected, and that they would further dilute Hispanic voter influence. Whatever else, the city-wide winner-take-all system must remain intact.

That meant the city also summarily dismissed another great way to elect a council – ranked choice – a method that would maximize potential Hispanic success, if that were an actual goal. Several years ago I wrote a paean in these pages to my boyhood memories of living in a ranked choice ultra-conservative city, where said electoral system gave us a good cross-section of our city’s economic, racial and philosophical diversity on our council.

So the city came up with this vote-limiting “citywide single vote” regime, claiming by assertion but without presenting any evidence that it would be the best way to promote Hispanic vote success. The city claims this system will enable like-minded minority affinity groups to coalesce around a single candidate and elect her.

How that is any different from opportunities under the present situation, however, is unclear. What is clear, though, is the assumption’s birth-connection with one of the hoariest of DEI myths, that “people of color” have a unity of interest against oppressive white forces, and that determines how they will vote.

How ironic such nonsense could be put forth to justify election meddling immediately following a national election in which hundreds of thousands of Blacks unexpectedly deserted one of their own and voted instead for a rich, white, bigoted, pussy-grabbing convicted felon rather than the Black candidate.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine why the complainants settled for a system that would lock in the status quo. It’s pretty clear nobody benefits from this other than the current electeds, whose seat holding will not be challenged by a change to district elections or ranked choice.

The single-vote change is to run for the next two elections, at which time if there’s no “improvement” in Hispanic outcomes, the city has agreed to go to district elections. How “improvement” will be measured is a mystery as we the people have been given no metrics to understand that.

What is very clear, however, is that the single-vote regime further undermines public trust in the electoral process because it maximizes “wasted votes.” Wasted votes are votes cast by voters that play no role in electing anyone. Let’s say we have six council candidates for two seats. Till now I’ve had two votes, and have a fair chance of voting for a winner. If I don’t, my votes go into the trash, i.e., they’re wasted.

With only one vote for six candidates, the chance of my vote being wasted has just skyrocketed. Wholesale vote wasting discourages voting, as it feeds the cynicism that voting makes no difference. I myself have gone for periods of years when all of my council votes have been wasted. I’m not going to quit voting because of that just because of who I am, but people less involved in public affairs, who are the overwhelming majority, may well stop voting. And how is that good for representative democracy’s health?

How the city of SLO has effected this voting change strikes me as Exhibit A in why we need true voting reform in our city. The public should have been invited to be part of the change from the day the lawsuit threat arrived. Instead, we were entirely shut out, and now will have to live with the outcome of our exclusion.