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Voting Rights Project Prevails at U.S. Supreme Court

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The UCLA Voting Rights Project scored another legal victory when the United States Supreme Court denied a last-ditch attempt to invalidate a lower court ruling relating to a redistricting map in Washington state that violated the Federal Voting Rights Act. The map would have diluted Latino electoral influence. Sonni Waknin, VRP program manager and voting rights counsel, said in a news release picked up by media outlets that this will lead to a lawful map during the next general election in the Washington Legislature. “This decision guarantees that all voters can participate, assured their votes count on a map adhering to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We are proud to advocate for our clients in the Yakima Valley,” Waknin said. The legal victory is among a string of similar actions by the VRP, which is affiliated with the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Insitute and saw two of its leaders — Matt Barreto and Chad Dunn  — profiled in a UCLA Magazine story about professors working to guarantee free and fair elections.

Read the news release
Read the magazine story

 

UCLA Downtown Springs to Life With Community-Focused Projects Programs connected to UCLA Luskin are among 31 selected for the site in the heart of Los Angeles

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With the purchase of the historic Trust Building in downtown Los Angeles last June, UCLA signaled its commitment to strengthening its engagement with the city’s diverse communities and creating positive change for the people of Southern California.

Over the next few months, the 11-story UCLA Downtown property in the Historic Core will begin to come to life as a collaborative hub where Bruins partner with local community members and organizations on a range of academic, research, arts-related and outreach initiatives, many of them focused on social justice and advocacy on behalf of underserved and vulnerable populations.

Among the 31 newly selected occupants of UCLA Downtown are programs addressing climate change and environmental justice, education for incarcerated individuals, labor and employment, housing and homelessness, immigration, public health, voting rights, LGBTQ issues, criminal justice reform and the history of Los Angeles, along with a robust slate of community-focused arts and cultural projects.

UCLA Downtown programs connected to the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs include the Voting Rights Project at the Latino Policy and Politics Institute, scheduled to begin operating in the new space by June. Joining the site at a later date will be the Los Angeles Education Research Institute; Downtown Luskin, led by the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies; and the Research Justice Hub, led by the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. UCLA Luskin faculty are also involved with several UCLA Downtown programs led by other campus units.

A 12-member committee selected the inaugural programs from among about 50 proposals based on their potential to foster community engagement — one of the key pillars of UCLA’s Strategic Plan — to promote collaboration across UCLA schools, departments and units, and to make a significant difference in the lives of both Bruins and Angelenos. A request for proposals for additional programs will be issued this fall.

Read the full story.

Read about the 31 UCLA Downtown programs selected to date.

 

Gilens on Efforts to Undercut American Democracy

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Public Policy Chair Martin Gilens joined a Scholars’ Circle panel weighing threats to American democracy and prescriptions for reinvigorating democratic norms. Recent efforts to overturn elections and restrict voting rights are rooted in a long-standing lack of government responsiveness to the needs of ordinary citizens, said Gilens, noting that the nation’s elite is responsible for the latest attacks on democratic practices. “It doesn’t take a majority of the public to abandon democracy, for our institutions to be eroded or our electoral processes to be undermined,” he said. “It only takes a willingness of people to look the other way.” Gilens likened the current political atmosphere to the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th Century, a period of gaping economic inequality and dysfunctional government. Political and economic reforms were enacted, but only after decades of effort at the local, state and national levels. “The change did come, but it didn’t come quickly or easily,” he said.

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Tackling Voter Dilution in California UCLA Voting Rights Project fights to ensure equitable representation in Orange and Yolo counties

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By Jose Garcia

As counties across California finalize new electoral boundaries in a once-in-a-decade process known as redistricting, the UCLA Voting Rights Project (VRP) is successfully providing guidance to decision-makers to ensure full compliance with federal and state laws.

California has experienced rapid demographic changes, such as Latinos becoming the largest ethnic majority in the state, and county boards get one shot to draw fair and equitable district maps for the next decade. In the past, California has seen patterns of voter dilution that many wish to see corrected.

The Voting Rights Project, the flagship project of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI), is placing direct pressure on decision-makers through high-level analysis of district maps and leveraging of local media, with the goal of ensuring that equitably drawn maps are implemented.

In Orange County, a region that is 34% Latino, the county Board of Supervisors has not seen Latino representation in over 15 years. This is largely attributed to the way district boundaries have been drawn in the past.

In response, the Voting Rights Project published a report analyzing proposed maps for the county’s supervisorial districts and detailed the steps needed to ensure full compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act.

“Several of the proposed maps, while appearing to be compliant, did not actually meet requirements to give areas with a high percentage of people of color a chance of electing a representative from their community,” said Sonni Waknin, voting rights counsel for the VRP.

Some of the proposed maps ensured that Latinos were less able to elect candidates of their choice by “cracking,” or splitting, adjacent cities with ethnic majorities, such as Santa Ana and Anaheim, according to Sonja Diaz, founding director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

The Voting Rights Project urged the Orange County Board of Supervisors to implement specific boundary changes that would create the county’s first majority-Latino supervisorial district — which the board subsequently adopted in a historic vote.

“We are incredibly proud to have ensured that Orange County recognized the need for Latinos to elect candidates of their choice, as required by the federal Voting Rights Act,” Waknin said.

Her team harnessed the success in Orange County and began deploying similar strategies across the state throughout the fall of 2021.

Yolo County, a region at high risk of voter dilution under proposed district boundaries, was a priority. While voters had been able to elect a Latino candidate under existing maps, the margin of victory was narrow, considering that Latinos accounted for 69% of the county’s total population growth over the last 10 years.

As it did in Orange County, Waknin’s team analyzed proposed maps and demographics in Yolo County and found that several plans under consideration would crack the Latino population of existing districts and lower the Latino voting-age population below thresholds required by the Voting Rights Act.

A VRP memo sent to the Yolo County Board of Supervisors argued that three of the four originally proposed maps would absolutely dilute the power of Latino voters. Following the memo and a coordinated media strategy, the supervisors unanimously voted to adopt district borders closely resembling the VRP’s recommendations.

“Latino communities have driven the growth of California for the past decade,” Waknin said. “Their political voice must be heard at every level, including local governments.”

At the local level, cities and counties use new census data to redraw district lines to reflect changes in their populations. California’s congressional districts are redrawn every decade by an independent commission of citizens from across the state.

Currently, over half of the U.S. has finished the redistricting process, and many of the approved maps will ultimately undercut communities of color, according to Waknin. Her team is continuing its involvement in places facing potential voter dilution outside of California, including in key states such as Texas and Washington.

“Through this work, the UCLA Voting Rights Project is playing a critical role in protecting the integrity of the state’s and nation’s democracy,” Diaz said. “The project is fundamentally influencing how political boundaries are redrawn to create an equitable electoral system for all.”

Envisioning a New Voting Rights Act for the 21st Century At UCLA conference, experts map out new federal protections after an election season marred by suppression and intimidation

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By Mary Braswell

Voting rights experts from around the country gathered at a UCLA conference to brainstorm ways to protect Americans’ access to the ballot box, even as votes cast in the 2020 election continued to be challenged in court.

Elected officials on the front lines of the civil rights fight joined legal scholars, policy analysts, attorneys and advocates at the Dec. 8–9 virtual seminar. The event was hosted by the Voting Rights Project, a division of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin.

The seminar’s organizers intend to turn the attendees’ shared wisdom into a report to Congress that could help shape comprehensive national legislation to safeguard the right to vote.

Among the topics that guided the conversation: voter suppression and intimidation during this year’s election cycle and the Supreme Court’s 2013 rollback of core provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“This is what we get when we have elections without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act that stood and served well for more than 50 years,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said. “It has unleashed the floodgates for a lot of the voter suppression measures that we’ve seen in the last seven years and we saw in full display in the 2020 election.”

Texas Rep. Marc Veasey, who co-founded the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus, said the country is witnessing “egregious stories that you would think we wouldn’t be seeing in modern-day America.”

In his state, he said, officials have attempted to require people registering to vote to first produce a birth certificate or passport. Another proposal, seen as an invitation to voter intimidation, would have permitted cellphone recordings of citizens casting their ballots as a way to document “fraud.”

“We’re revisiting a very dark time in U.S. history where people just absolutely have no regrets at all about rolling back the rights of people to be able to vote, particularly people of color,” he said.

For example, Padilla noted, during the Georgia primaries, the wait time to vote in Black neighborhoods averaged 51 minutes, compared with six minutes in white neighborhoods.

While some state and local jurisdictions are pushing for rules that chip away at the freedom to vote, others are lighting the way for federal reforms, the speakers stressed.

Padilla and Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea spoke of changes in their states that have made it easier for citizens to register and vote — changes that were accelerated because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What made this cycle different is that the pandemic focused us to reexamine how people vote,” Gorbea said. “And in many of our states we adapted our democracy to provide easier and safer access to the ballot box, which meant that people could vote while still taking care of their health.”

The seminar included workshops that zeroed in on specific facets of the voting rights movement, including fair redistricting, equal access for low-income and minority communities, planning for the next public health crisis, and overcoming procedural hurdles that have blocked past efforts to bring change.

Panelists and participants in the audience weighed in on the strengths and omissions of legislation already in the pipeline, including HR1, the For the People Act, and HR4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Panelists represented several organizations with long histories of championing voting rights, including the ACLU, Campaign Legal Center, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

The discussion took place amid persistent efforts by President Donald Trump and some of his supporters to discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election. Padilla said those efforts have been fueled by “baseless conspiracy theories that have been spewed that seek to question the legitimacy of votes cast by Black voters and Latino voters, among others.”

The seminar capped a hectic electoral season for the Voting Rights Project, whose members conducted research, wrote policy reports and appeared in court to battle efforts to disenfranchise voters.

Tye Rush, a UCLA political science doctoral student, said a reinvigorated Voting Rights Act for the 21st century would eliminate the need for piecemeal litigation of civil rights violations.

“We’re looking to get something in front of Congress that can be signed and that will protect against the onslaught of voting rights–related rollbacks that we’re seeing in this era,” said Rush, a research fellow at the Voting Rights Project.

Katz on California’s Spotty Voting Rights History

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Alisa Belinkoff Katz, associate director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that laid out California’s spotty history when it comes to free access to the ballot box. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the state systematically discriminated against groups including Chinese immigrants and the working poor, she wrote. By 1960, the state had veered away from tactics such as arduous registration requirements, literacy tests and voter roll purges and entered a more inclusive era. While California now offers early voting, vote by mail, internet registration, same-day registration, a “motor voter” program and other policies designed to encourage voting, “the California electorate remains older, whiter and wealthier than the population at large,” wrote Katz, lead author of a recent study on the evolution of voter access in the state. “Until our democracy gives voice to all segments of society, we still have work to do.”

Read the op-ed

Election Primer: When Will We Know Who Won?

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Voting Rights Project Helps Protect 127,000 Texas Ballots

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Texas voters and the UCLA Voting Rights Project scored a legal victory with a federal judge’s dismissal of a suit to invalidate more than 127,000 ballots in the state’s most populous county. Chad Dunn, the project’s director of litigation, has been leading the legal effort to protect voting rights in Texas and was part of the legal team defending the drive-through voting option in largely Democratic Harris County. This option permitted voters to cast their ballots from their cars, similar to drive-through banking. The drive-through voting plans had been in place since July and had been approved by the Texas secretary of state. The plaintiffs, members of the state’s Republican Party, filed two motions to the Texas Supreme Court seeking to throw out the drive-through votes; both were denied. The plaintiffs then turned to the federal courts, where a judge ruled Monday that they did not have standing to sue. Hours after the decision was handed down, the Republican plaintiffs filed an appeal to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which denied the motion early Tuesday — Election Day. “It was obvious that this method of voting was approved by the state of Texas and this late attempt to strip voters of their rights was rightfully denied,” Dunn said. “Every vote from a qualified voter should be counted.” — Sonni Waknin

 

UCLA Voting Rights Project Scores Court Victories

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UCLA’s Voting Rights Project (VRP) scored major court victories in Texas and Pennsylvania in its fight against attempts to suppress the voice of voters in this critical election year. In Texas, a federal judge blocked Gov. Greg Abbott’s attempt to limit ballot drop boxes to one per county. VRP, part of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin, partnered with the League of United Latin American Citizens to sue Abbott. Chad Dunn, VRP’s director of litigation, argued the case in federal court on Oct. 8. The following day, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman struck down Abbott’s order, finding that it resulted in substantial confusion, created burdens on disabled, elderly and minority voters, and “likely violates their fundamental right to vote.” To support the case, Matt Barreto, VRP’s faculty director, co-authored an expert report with research fellow Michael Rios MPP ’20 and political science doctoral students Chelsea Jones and Marcel Roman. They documented that Abbott’s rule would force some voters to travel more than 90 miles round-trip to a downtown ballot return center, as opposed to a satellite county office within five miles. The research also found that many voters preferred using official drop-off sites rather than mailing in their ballots due to concerns about Postal Service slowdowns. In Pennsylvania, a U.S. District Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by President Trump’s reelection campaign that sought to place several restrictions on voting, including prohibiting voters from submitting ballots in drop boxes. VRP submitted an expert report documenting the importance of ballot drop boxes and the need to prevent voter intimidation. In the event these rulings are appealed, VRP is ready to file an appellate brief to defend every citizen’s right to vote.

Update: On Oct. 27, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the governor’s order to restrict the state’s counties to only one drop-off site for mail-in ballots.

 

Diaz on Re-Envisioning a Post-Coronavirus America

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In a Q&A with Governing, Latino Policy and Politics Initiative Executive Director Sonja Diaz weighed in on the links between systemic racism and immigration policy and set out a vision for a more equitable post-pandemic society. COVID-19, police violence against people of color and persistent economic inequality have created an existential crisis in the United States, and “incremental change is not going to solve anything,” Diaz said. “We cannot go back to a ‘normal’ with so many Americans living on the streets, so many Americans without health insurance, so many Americans being targeted or racially profiled by our police. We have to re-envision what a post-coronavirus America looks like,” she said. Diaz also co-authored an opinion piece for Morning Consult that decried efforts to disenfranchise voters of color and called on Congress to act decisively to protect the integrity of the 2020 Census.

Read the Governing Q&A
Read the Morning Consult op-ed

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