Mayoral Court Case

Update (12/20/04): Left Coast Law responds on his own blog.

Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at Loyola Law School, has written an excellent opinion piece on the soon to be impending law suit which will leave it up to a court to decide our next mayor. Longterm readers know I’ve got my liberal bias, but two passages really stuck out for me:

In a number of ways, the coming legal contest is a lower-stakes version of Bush v. Gore, the Florida litigation that ended the 2000 presidential election. Again, Democrats are asking for the intent of the voters to prevail and for courts to require elections officials to “count every vote.” And Republicans are stressing compliance with the technical rules. They argue that fairness in elections requires that counting be done following the rules as written.

I think this is what it really all comes down to. Voters who wrote in Frye’s name, but did not fill in the bubble, clearly intended to vote for her. But it is equally true that the “Elections Code expressly provides that ‘no write-in vote shall be counted unless the voting space next to the write-in space is marked or slotted as directed in the voting instructions.”

And so what this court case comes down to is should we decide our next mayor based on voters’ intent or Elections Code. I have a feeling it’s probably a partisan decision, but there is one thing we can all agree on and that is Hasen’s closing paragraph:

After this controversy ends, San Diego and California need to rewrite election laws more clearly and make the mechanics of voting easier so that fewer disputes like this arise. We cannot eliminate the possibility of close elections, but we can do much more to make sure that our election machinery translates the will of the people into an accurate and fair vote count without the need for judicial intervention.

I’d be especially curious to hear what law student Reza Torkzadeh and Left Coast Law have to say about the case. Left Coast Law has written much about Donna Frye’s candidacy in the past.

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