Op-Ed: Beyond District Lines: Rethinking the California Voting Rights Act's Promise of Fair Representation
This California Law Review Note argues that the California Voting Rights Act, which pushed hundreds of cities and school districts from at-large to district-based elections, has delivered uneven results, improving Latine and AAPI officeholding in some Bay Area school districts while producing no gains or losses in others. The authors find that California law effectively forecloses the alternative systems, including cumulative voting and other proportional methods, that could do more to elect candidates of choice in diverse communities. They argue the state should reform the CVRA so local governments have remedies beyond drawing district lines, an argument that lines up closely with the case for proportional ranked choice voting in California.