COUNCIL DELAYS VOTE ON MAP CRITICS CLAIM TOKOFSKY TARGETED.

Byline: Erik N. Nelson Staff Writer

Los Angeles City Council members on Tuesday put off voting on a controversial new city school board district map with a narrow, twisted Eastside district so packed with a Latino population that it might actually diminish chances of electing Latino board members in other districts.

Some critics charged that the proposal for District 5 to have a 78.6 percent Latino population is aimed straight at ousting board member David Tokofsky, who has twice narrowly won election in a Latino-dominated district that for a decade has stretched from L.A.'s Eastside to the city of San Fernando.

``I've never heard of anything like it (the map revision) before. Nothing legal, anyway,'' said Joseph Doherty, a University of California, Los Angeles, political scientist and director of the Empirical Research Group at the UCLA School of Law. ``Their argument is naturally a reaction to David Tokofsky being twice elected to the board in a district that (Latinos) thought was theirs to win.''

Using arguments from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the City Council's Ad Hoc Redistricting Committee voted 3-2 last Thursday to reject the citizen's commission recommendation for District 5 to have a Latino voter registration of 51 percent. The revision would boost Latino registration to nearly 58 percent.

City Council members decided to put off voting on the committee's preferred map, as well as two alternative maps, until June 2, after the committee revisits the matter Thursday.

The argument for the boost in Latino population was that whites vote as a bloc for white candidates, and thus have more voting clout than Latinos, who suffer from low voter turnout. That concept of polarized voting makes it necessary to compensate with a much healthier majority of Latinos to increase the odds that they can elect the candidate of their choice, proponents argue.

Supporters of the map cite a 1986 Supreme Court decision, Thornburgh vs. Gingles, that showed effective discrimination against African-Americans in the reapportionment of North Carolina's state legislative districts.

``Even though the voter registration was over 50 percent, that's not enough to make it bullet-proof'' from a lawsuit charging that it violated the Voting Rights Act by denying Latinos the right to elect the candidate of their choice, said Jessie Hines, the assistant city attorney who has provided legal guidance to both the LAUSD Citizen's Redistricting Commission and the City Council.

MALDEF and city analysts looked at Eastside and southeast cities that are part of the LAUSD and considered how people in the district voted for Latino candidates such as 2001 mayoral hopeful Antonio Villaraigosa and on Latino issues such as Proposition 187, which sought to cut benefits for illegal aliens.

``You start looking at the behavior of the electorate in that area, and what you're seeing is racially motivated votes,'' Hines said.

But redistricting experts raised their eyebrows at the overwhelming nature of the remedy.

``I cannot think of a case where a 51 percent (minority) district is challenged as being illegal,'' said Nathaniel Persily, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who drew New York state's congressional districts to enforce a Voting Rights Act court order.

``Rarely is a court going to order the creation of a 78 percent Hispanic district. That is a huge number,'' Persily said. ``At a certain point, when you start packing like this, it starts diminishing their political influence.''

Persily also said the Gingles case required the plaintiff to prove that the minority community was politically cohesive, a word that many Southern California political analysts agree does not apply to Latinos in Los Angeles.

Mayor James Hahn, for instance, was elected with sizable support from Latinos who chose not to back Latino candidate Villaraigosa.

Tokofsky, testifying before the council Tuesday, quoted earlier MALDEF and City Attorney's Office pronouncements that earlier versions of District 5 appeared to satisfy the Voting Rights Act requirements.