MISSION VIEJO, Calif.—A Mission Viejo resident filed a lawsuit on April 7 against the city arguing that all five of its city council seats should be up for a vote in November.
At issue is a complicated failed attempt by the city to comply with a 2018 lawsuit settlement to make its elections decided by cumulative voting, meaning city voters would cast up to five ballots for the city’s five council seats.
The new voting model was initially to have started in 2020. But after having difficulty getting approval from the state to implement it, the goal became 2022.
Either timeline resulted in changing the terms of councilors elected in 2018 and 2020 to be for two years only, instead of the usual four-year terms.
For two years, city officials say, they attempted to implement the new voting method.
But while the issue was still in doubt, the city council voted in the summer of 2020 to extend the terms of the councilors elected in 2018—Wendy Bucknum, Greg Raths, and Ed Sachs—to be for four years, which had been the city’s normal course.
Following this, the city has now scheduled the election for councilors Trish Kelley and Brian Goodell elected in 2020 for the 2024 ballot.
City officials say in both cases, elections for its city councilors have reverted to the usual four-year staggered terms, as the city ultimately in 2021 declared cumulative voting could not be implemented because of concerns from the state.
“The Secretary of State in early this year, made it definitely clear that absent either a change by the Legislature or us litigating, they didn’t feel comfortable administratively allowing one ... city to go cumulative,” Mission Viejo City Attorney William Curly told The Epoch Times.
Based on a 2020 amended agreement between the city and the suing voting rights group, the city was given the option of moving to district-wide voting—which it voted to do last month—if the cumulative model was not feasible under state law.
That stipulated agreement additionally indicated all five seats of the council would be up for election in 2022.
In his lawsuit, plaintiff Michael Schlesinger states the city refused to place Bucknum, Raths, and Sachs’s seats up for re-election in 2020 even though their terms had expired under the city’s plans to implement cumulative voting, “effectively granting themselves a two-year extension. And now in 2022, the [c]ity is poised to do so once again, affording the same illegal benefit to” councilmembers Kelley and Goodell.
Bucknum, Raths, and Sachs are currently scheduled for the 2022 ballot, based on their 2018 election date.
Schlesinger’s concerns now are the seats that were elected in 2020.
“This lawsuit is stopping this travesty of justice,” Schlesinger said in a statement emailed by his attorney to The Epoch Times. “A simple resolution would be for Mr. Goodell and Ms. Kelley to acknowledge that their terms will expire in December and stand for election. In this way, the City would save legal fees and costs.”
But the city says the conditions regarding changing the councilors’ terms to two years no longer apply.
According to the 2018 stipulation on the matter, “[t]he members of the Mission Viejo City Council in office on the date judgment is entered by the Orange County Superior Court shall continue in office until the expiration of their respective terms and until their successors are elected and qualified.”
According to William Curley, Mission Viejo’s city attorney, that statement indicates to the city that since cumulative voting never was enacted, the requirement to change their terms to two years is null and void.
The Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project sued Mission Viejo in 2018 saying the city’s at-large voting system disenfranchised Latino voters, which violated the California Voting Rights Act.
