History

Santa Clara has long had a form of elections known as At Large voting. This method is a form of first-past-the-post voting. It was extremely common at the time, and allowed for easy tabulation of votes by hand.

This is a good way to easily distribute responsibility for governance across multiple people, avoiding the issues that come with selecting only a single person at the ballot box to make decisions. However, it has a large flaw.

With At Large voting, you essentially run the same election for as many seats as you want to fill. A candidate has to choose which seat they are running for, but can easily win with the same set of voters as one of the other seats. A large voting block that votes as a group for all council races could easily win all seats, leaving the rest of the population disenfranchised.

In 2001, California passed the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA). Among other things, it allowed individuals to sue when they are getting provably disenfranchised by an election system.

There were two forms of election commonly used by local governments at the time: At Large voting, where each seat is run independently in a first-past-the-post election, and Single Member Districts, where the locality is split into as small of districts as possible and each district is run in a first-past-the-post election. Of the two, Single Member Districts are generally considered better at avoiding disenfranchisement than At Large voting, although both have major problems.

Perhaps deferring to a history of local control, the CVRA does not ban At Large Voting, but allows individuals of protected groups to sue if they can show disproportionate impact. Further, to avoid all systems being declared illegal in a locality, it provides a safe harbor for localities using Single Member Districts.

In 2011, a group called the Asian Law Alliance sent the City of Santa Clara a letter claiming the believed the city's At Large election was running afoul of the the California Voting Rights Act. In response the city formed a Charter Review Committee in 2011 to look at the issue.

The 2011-2012 Charter Review Committee analyzed the demographics of the city and gathered public input, and determined that the current system was an issue. They looked at many possible solutions. Ultimately, they determined that the At Large election system was a problem, but that Single Member Districts would work poorly in Santa Clara due to how our demographics are laid out in the city. We do not have strong concentrations of protected groups that allow the Single Member District system to work in decreasing disenfranchisement.

The Committee recommended the City investigate alternative solutions, but those would likely come with a large up-front cost of updating voting systems to enable them to work. In the end, the city took no action on the committee's report.

After several years of no action, the Asian Law Alliance sent a follow up letter to the city. The city formed another CRC, the 2017-2018 Charter Review Committee, but that was too late and the Asian Law Alliance filed suit against the city under the CVRA.

The 2017-2018 Charter Review Committee followed up on the findings of the 2011-2012 CRC and crafted a complex, compromise recommendation. The city would be split into two districts (because having any districts might put the city into the safe harbor), it would use Ranked Choice / STV once the technology became available (not until 2020 at least, and it was uncertain past that point), and until then it would use a variant of the At Large system for elections. Eventually this collated into the 2018 ballot "Measure A"

By the election, the City had lost the lawsuit, but the judge was holding his 'remedy' ruling to see the outcome of the election. Because it included some voting reform components, Measure A attracted some external voting reform attention (and financing). Despite the complexity of the measure, it still almost passed: Measure A failed 52 - 47. In the end, the cries of 'splitting the city in half' and 'it doesn't fix the problem now' were too great for it to overcome.

After the 2018 failure, the City appealed the court ruling. They do not contest that the old system has problem, simply that the math behind proving disenfranchisement was not good. They also placed a new ballot measure on the Ballot, Measure N: Should the city engage in a public process to move to districts? This passed with over 70% of the vote yes, although it was intentionally worded NOT to bring up the hard issues of how to split the city or how many districts, but simply that we adopt something new through a public process.

In 2019, the city called a new Charter Review Committee to implement Measure N. The 2019 Charter Review Committee was heavily targeted: They were to only implement Measure N and do so in a very compressed time table. After conducting local engagement, the committee came up with Measure C, A ballot measure to move to three districts. This approach failed after the measure received extreme financing against by a local sports team. In the end, Measure C failed with 60% against.

Finally, after all of this, the County has announced it finally has the capacity to hold multi-winner, Single Transferable Vote election. This is the type of system that multiple groups looking at the city were interested in, but was technically infeasible at the time.

So now in 2020, We have a charter that says to use an outdated at-large system, we are under court order to use a Single Member District system, all attempts as hybrid systems have failed, and we finally have the ability to adopt the system that would actually work well in our city.

All that is needed is the political will to make it happen. Sign here.