The Bay Citizen: San Mateo’s Asian and Hispanic Voters Speak Up

“The border is Eighth Avenue,” said Ms. Ortega, 67, who immigrated from Guatemala to Redwood City in 1970. “You come down Middlefield and the view is completely different all of a sudden. It’s like two societies.”

In many ways, the juxtaposition of the heavily Latino, working-class North Fair Oaks neighborhood and the largely white city of Atherton — home to the likes of the Apple C.E.O., Steven P. Jobs, and the executive chairman of Google, Eric E. Schmidt — captures the disparities in class and race found all over the Bay Area. ?

But some say that gulf also underscores a gap in political representation for ethnic and racial minorities in San Mateo County that is unique in California.

San Mateo is the only county in California that still elects its Board of Supervisors through at-large elections in which all candidates run countywide. In the past three decades, all 57 other counties in the state have moved to a district system, whereby the county is split into districts and each elects its own representative.

Last month, Ms. Ortega and eight other plaintiffs sued San Mateo County in an effort to change the way voters elect the powerful Board of Supervisors. Latinos and Asians make up half of the county’s population, yet they rarely hold high-ranking elected offices.

Ms. Ortega and her fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue that the county is in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which outlawed at-large voting in places with histories of racially polarized voting or where minority groups are “too geographically dispersed to elect their candidate of choice from a single member district.”

Since 1995, only one Latino — and not a single Asian — has won countywide office in San Mateo, said Robert Rubin, a lawyer at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Although the 2010 census showed that for the first time in San Mateo County history, non-Hispanic whites — who are now 42.9 percent of the population — fell out of the majority, four out of five current supervisors are white. The fifth, who is African-American, was appointed to a vacant seat by the board in 1999.

A district voting system would yield at least one Asian and one Latino supervisor, Mr. Rubin predicted. “The white community votes as a bloc that defeats the electoral choices of the minority,” he said.

The lawsuit — and its implied suggestion of racism — has struck a nerve in a county that considers itself solidly liberal. County officials say going to a district system would promote provincialism, while others point to San Francisco’s polarized Board of Supervisors.

Residents say that despite the income disparity, signs of racial tension are almost nonexistent and that local governments spend heavily on social services for immigrants. As long ago as 1974, for instance, San Mateo County built a community center to provide health services and English and citizenship classes for North Fair Oaks.

“San Mateo County has always been reaching out to the underserved and welcoming its immigrants,” said Sister Christina Heltsley, the executive director of the St. Francis Center, a nonprofit in Redwood City.

County Counsel John C. Beiers said it had been the dearth of Asian and Latino candidates, rather than racially tinged voting patterns, that had led to a mostly white Board of Supervisors. “We looked at our races and haven’t found any conclusion of racially polarized voting,” said Mr. Beiers. “Our supervisors are very proud of the fact that they represent all of the constituents countywide.”