Most people who care about making Los Angeles a better, more functional city agree that expanding the City Council is necessary. The 15 members each represent districts of roughly 260,000 people, which gives them too much power and too little accountability.
Expanding the City Council by 10 was one of the many proposals – and one of the most consequential – recommended last April by the city’s Charter Reform Commission. Yet on Wednesday, a council majority voted not to include expansion in a package of city charter changes intended for the November ballot. Their reasoning? The idea needs more study.
Forgive my profanity, but that is complete bullshit. This idea has been studied exhaustively for well over a quarter of a century, including by previous charter commissions. There’s nothing left to study.
Golden State is a reader-supported publication. No billionaires tell us what to do. Help us to stay independent with a tax-deductible donation.
Besides, the council didn’t seem all that worried about including another proposal it had not studied at all: a highly controversial provision to allow noncitizens, including those here without authorization, to vote in local elections that had been suggested less than two months ago by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez.
It’s almost as if the council wants to doom any reform package that goes before voters in November.
This couldn’t be a worse time to advance such a politically radioactive measure. The legitimacy of the outcome of the Los Angeles mayor’s primary election has been under assault by President Trump, Republican leaders and conservative media because it took several days to count ballots. And those same voices have been relentlessly and baselessly attacking California’s election system for years, convincing many that legions of dead and undocumented people are casting ballots here.
The president has also signaled that he might interfere with November elections to stop Republicans from losing the House. This is a supremely bad time to add fuel to the fire.
Guest Contributors
By the way, allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal elections isn’t just a concern of conservatives. In 2019, when the Los Angeles Unified School District considered letting noncitizen parents vote in elections, the liberal-leaning Los Angeles Times editorial board opposed the idea, saying that “the privilege of voting is one that rightly belongs to citizens.”
And there’s the question of whether immigrants already living under the ever-present fear of detention and deportation would want to risk putting their names on voter rolls.
Voters in San Francisco passed a measure in 2016 allowing noncitizen parents with enrolled children to vote in school district elections. But they do so at their own peril, as the city warns on its website: “Any information you provide to the Department of Elections, including your name and address, may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Josh Gohlke
Even strategist Michael Trujillo, who pushed LAUSD to explore noncitizen voting in 2019, is wary about the current proposal. In a post on X Thursday, he noted that any campaign operative could buy a list of noncitizens eligible to vote, which means “ICE can get access and just have a ready made list of folks to kidnap.”
The question now is how Mayor Karen Bass handles the noncitizen voting measure. Bass has a tough re-election fight against City Councilmember Nithya Raman in November. If she endorses the changes, Bass may lose any chance at winning over the 200,000 voters who supported Republican Spencer Pratt in the primary.
At an event Wednesday at UCLA’s new downtown center immediately after the council’s vote on the charter package, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson defended the measure by saying it merely opens the door to noncitizen voting, and that the council would have to pass an ordinance in the future to make it happen. That argument is unlikely to quell any dissent given that all but one of the council members who voted for the measure will still be on the council next year. (He also joked that the council should be smaller, not larger.)
To me, all of this just underscores why the city of Los Angeles needs a larger council. With five or 10 more people casting votes, it would improve the odds that the council would focus on actually fixing City Hall and not creating more problems.
Golden State staff
