By Michael Warnken

Sept. 10, 2012

Until the public shooting of two Hispanic men by local police just a month ago, Anaheim was mostly known for the Anaheim Angels, Gene Autry and Disneyland. Today, we are well aware it is not the happiest place on earth. Anaheim, like many other parts of the state, has a gang problem and it seems to a have a police problem, too, as the recent shootings by police occurred in broad daylight under questionable circumstances.

Mayor Tom Tait called for an investigation into these incidents by the offices of California Attorney General Kamala Harris and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. However, local residents were not satisfied, and many felt that the police had crossed the line, especially since there had been six other similar events this year, five of which were fatal.

Most of the police brutality was focused around Hispanic citizens, who make up half of city residents. However, because many residents are immigrants who are not citizens, perhaps about one third of the city’s eligible voters are Hispanic.

The council’s current makeup is: Lori Galloway, half Hispanic, half Filipina; Harry Sidhu, a Sikh immigrant from India; and two Anglos, Gail Eastman and Kris Murray.

So Hispanic activists began calling for changes in the city’s electoral system. Along with others, the activists believe there is a connection between the electoral system in Anaheim and the violence.

The Orange County Register also reported:

“Those pushing for change point to the elegant neighborhoods of Anaheim Hills. The city’s current voting system has concentrated overwhelming political power there: Four of the city’s five council members are residents.

“That far exceeds the percentage of city voters who live there, a disparity that districts would remedy — according to their supporters — by more evenly distributing council seats. A review of voter-registration numbers by ZIP code shows that the Anaheim Hills area accounts for less than a fourth of the city’s voters.

“By comparison, the central part of the city — including Disneyland but also the hard-life neighborhoods at the heart of recent protests — has more than a third of the city’s voters but only one resident council member. And the west side of Anaheim accounts for about 40 percent of the city’s registered voters, but is home to no council member.”

On August 8, the Anaheim city council held a special hearing where a proposal by Tait was considered to raise the number of council members from four to six, with calls for an increase to as many as eight. Calls also went up to switch from the current system of at-large elections for council members to a system in which members are elected by geographical district. The council did not vote to send the proposal to the voters, but tabled it for further investigation.

At-Large Elections

An at-large electoral system exists when all the representatives in a city are elected by the entire populace. The alternative to this is known as “district elections,” in which city council members are each elected from different geographical districts of the same population.

District elections give smaller areas of people direct access to a representative. The people of that district knows who represents them, and are able hold them more directly accountable for their actions and decisions. Representatives in at-large districts are less accountable and like to claim they “represent everyone,” but in actual practice, they tend to ignore everyone equally, except those who are celebrities, powerful special interests and large campaign donors.

At-large electoral systems are dubious to begin with, as they have long been used to suppress minority political participation. This  practice was mastered in the American South, where cities with black populations of 40 percent to 50 percent or more would not have a single black city council representative.  The problem was so bad in the South that the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress in 1965 to address this and other voting-rights problems. The act forced cities in the Southern states to hold single-member district elections.

As the largest city in Orange County and the 10th largest city in the state, with a population of about 340,000 people, Anaheim should have single-member district elections. A move to such a system would open the city up to more electoral diversity.  Just as juries and grand juries should reflect a cross section of a community, any properly formed electoral system should reflect the participants that they represent in a meaningful way.

Local Representation

In a reader rebuttal in the Orange County Register, council member Kris Murray justified the tabling of the proposal of moving to six members elected by district:

“There are still many questions to be answered surrounding those shootings, and several independent investigations are already underway to do so. Although some have asserted that there may be a correlation between the two issues, the city would be irresponsible to undertake wholesale change of its entire electoral system without first providing an opportunity for extensive citizen dialogue, careful legal analysis, and consideration of the options available to meet voters’ concerns for fair representation.”

But Police officers, judges and city administrative employees are added to governmental institutions without much thought. It’s silly to suggest that moving to district elections and adding more city councilors to the most important branch in a representative republic requires months of review. So, let’s indulge Murray on that point and consider the proposal for an increase in members and single member districts.

Currently, each of the four council members in Anaheim represents all 340,000 residents of Anaheim. If single-member districts were implemented without increasing the number of council members, each of four district would comprise about 85,000 people. An increase to six members would create districts of just under 60,000 people. (In both cases, I’m assuming the mayor, who sits on the council, would continue to be elected at large.)

But in evaluating this proposal, one simple question that needs to be asked is this: Is that real representation? Is that truly adequate? Can anyone even begin to honestly suggest that a city councilor can represent 60,000 or more people? So, why stop at just six members? At some point, the fundamental question needs to be asked: “How many people can a single city council member adequately represent?”

True representation means agency, direct contact and access by all. This might mean proper representation leads to significantly more elected council members (or their equivalents) Consider, for example the fact that Chicago has 50 aldermen and New York City has 51 city council members. More is not a problem; in fact, from a legislative standpoint, these cities work quite well.

More decentralization is needed

In the end, representatives are elected to resolve problems. More representatives would indeed help address Anaheim’s current problems — challenges that are not limited to gang violence and police brutality. If the city council had enough representatives, they could hold their own hearings investigating the police, like a state legislature or congress would and try to work them out rather than depending on the state and federal attorneys general. This amounts to self-government.

Further, at-large elections serve to protect incumbents from challengers because of the influence city employees have on such elections. Through their unions, city employees (including police) are more able to concentrate their influence and back their slate of candidates in at-large elections. The fewer representatives, the fewer votes on the council are required to raise taxes and spike employee pensions. The fewer representatives, the less accountable they and their employees are to the citizens.

Anaheim’s city council is not going to want to implement any changes. It will likely continue to put the matter off as long as it can because the reform needed is a direct threat to the current council’s power. The longer they are able to delay a change, the more they can maintain the status quo.

However, the citizens of Anaheim need to be vigilant. They need to keep pushing for more representation and single member districts. The thoughts and ideas of the representatives should be as broad and diverse as the people they represent. More representatives would achieve that goal as well as level the political playing field and lead to less violence and more accountability.

(Editor’s note: This is a revision of an earlier piece on the same subject.)

(Michael Warnken is an expert in the field of political representation and American electoral history.)

By John Seiler

San Francisco has a reputation as a “tolerant” city, the capital of the 1967 Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury and all that. Whatever it was in psychedelic Sixties, today it’s one of the most intolerant cities around. For example, on June 6, San Fran voted a whopping 74 percent for Proposition 29, the buck-a-pack cigarette tax. The rest of the state opposed it, 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent.

What have San Franciscans got against tobacco smokers, who tend to be poor people? No doubt it comes from city’s heritage of its major Anglo settlement by intolerant New England Puritans. They always want to tell everybody else what to do.

By contrast, Orange County was settled by more tolerant Okies and Mexicans. Not surprisingly, O.C. voted 59 percent to 41 percent against Prop. 29 — that is, in favor of tolerance toward smokers.

The latest display of San Francisco intolerance concerns Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy saying he wasn’t keen on same-sex “marriage.” He said it violates his religious beliefs.

It’s important to note that he didn’t say he was firing homosexuals from his company. And he didn’t come out in favor of bringing back anti-sodomy laws. He just expressed his religious opinion.

In response, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee attack-tweeted, “Very disappointed #ChickFilA doesn’t share San Francisco’s values & strong commitment to equality for everyone.” A second tweet: “Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”

As Anthony Gregory noted at the Independent Institute site:

“For his stance on this issue, which is not all that different from Obama’s stance just a year ago, many in the gay rights movement decided to boycott his fast food chain. Whatever one thinks of this, it is well within the rights of people to vote with their dollars. The Executive Director of Log Cabin Republicans argues that the boycott is poor strategy, however, because ‘turning a chicken sandwich into Public Gay Enemy Number One makes LGBT people look superficial, vindictive and juvenile—everything that we as a community have worked hard to overcome.’”

Private boycotts are one thing. But Anthony notes that it’s different when governments have gotten involved, because that involves the threat of coercion.

Banned in Boston

Other attacks on Cathy have come from Boston and Chicago. Both are understandable. Boston is even more intolerant than San Francisco, the very center of Puritan intolerance and haughtiness. Nowadays they’re not religious Puritans, but secular Puritans. Mayor Thomas Menino threatened, “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it”

Imagine that! No place for freedom on the Freedom Trail.

Boston’s famed intolerance, of course, originated the phrase “banned in Boston.” And it was just a few clicks north that their fellow Puritans burned  witches not so long ago. And check out that cover of a book on witches, image at the top. The book was printed in “Boston in N.E.” in 1702. It reads, “How Persons Guilty of that Crime may be Convicted.” Boston 1702 = Boston 2012 = Chicago 2012 = San Francisco 2012.

Chicago is notorious for having the most corrupt political machine in all America, which is saying a lot. In the Windy City, the dead not only walk, they vote. That’s also where we got the phrase, “Vote early and often.”

In Chicago, an alderman, Joe Moreno, banned Chick-fil-A from opening a store. Moreno was backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the notoriously foul-mouthed former chief-of-staff of President Obama. Emanuel said, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values. They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents. This would be a bad investment, since it would be empty.”

What a typical socialist. He thinks he knows how to run somebody else’s business, and how it will do. Meanwhile, while Emanuel and Moreno were wasting time on their own immense intolerance, Chicago’s murder rate has been soaring. For them, it’s tolerance for murderers, intolerance for someone just voicing his religious opinion.

It’s also worth pointing out that, not only is Cathy’s position the same as Obama’s last year, it’s the same as that of most Americans today, and of most American religious groups today.

Left-tyranny

Gregory again:

“While the most consistent left-liberal voices for civil liberties, among them the ACLU, have defended Chick-fil-A’s right to open a business regardless of the proprietor’s political views, there has been far too much silence or even enthusiasm toward these threats of political coercion, which carry potentially totalitarian implications. A government that can prohibit people from engaging in peaceful commerce based on traditional cultural and conservative political values is as big a threat to civil liberties as anything the left imagines a conservative Big Brother poses….

“Civil liberties are grounded in key principles of a free society, including an unflinching distrust in secular government and a respect for property rights. Without property rights, bodily integrity, freedom from censorship, and guarantees against lawless prosecution are impossible to maintain. Without distrusting government, society loses sight of the importance of civil liberties in the first place. The left has long attempted to marry a loyalty to civil liberties with a trust in government and an attitude toward property ranging from ambivalence to hostility. This contradictory approach to the principal issues of a just society fundamentally explains the unreliability and hypocrisy so often seen with many progressives when civil liberties are under attack.”

Right.

Lee, Menino, Moreno and Emanuel unfortunately are part of a rising trend in America of Left-intolerance, of using government coercion to suppress First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. This long has happened in Europe and Canada.

In America, this tyrannical trend needs to be stopped. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Eat dinner tonight at Chick-fil-A.