Non-Citizen Voting Won't be Allowed in PUSD

The PUSD Districting Task Force on Tuesday voted down a proposed change to charter language that could have opened the door to non-citizen voting in future school board elections.

As the Task Force moves toward bringing the district into better compliance with the California Voting Rights Act, the shift had been suggested in order to give a stronger voice to the district’s Latino population.

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According to PUSD figures Latinos make up about 60 percent of the district population, though not all of those residents are U.S. citizens.

Attorney Dale Gronomeier, who was asked to examine the legal ramifications of such a move, told the Task Force that while there had been attempts to allow non-citizen voting elsewhere in the state, none had been successful and there was no clear legal precedent on the issue.

“It would probably require a change in state law,” Gronomeier, who admitted to being a personal advocate for non-citizen voting, said at Tuesday’s meeting. Gronomeier summarized his analysis by saying that such a move should be undertaken on its own, rather than as part of the geographic sub-districting process.

“There would almost certainly be a legal challenge,” Gronomeier said, adding that if this was attempted in the new charter language “opponents of district elections will use it to mobilize those hostile to non-citizen voting to vote against district elections and we will gain nothing.”

Task Force members who initially supported changing the language, which currently refers to “qualified voters” as being eligible, agreed that they did not want to jeopardize the districting process by opening up a debate on non-citizen voting at the same time.

That said, Task Force member Diana Peterson-More proposed issuing a recommendation to the City of Pasadena and the Pasadena Unified School District that they look into the issue at some point.

“I see it as a civil rights issue,” Peterson-More said.

The board voted unanimously to approve the recommended changes to the school district charter language that they will present to the school board for approval on Oct. 11.

Following that meeting, the Districting Task Force will hold a series of community meetings designed to receive input into the geographic sub-districting process.

Currently, the seven PUSD School Board members are elected in an at-large voting system, where any candidate may live in any part of the PUSD and represents the entire district. Once the geographic sub-districting process is complete, the Task Force will have divided the PUSD into seven districts, each with its own designated seat on the school board.

Initial speculation into the districting process led many to believe that .

But as the process moved forward, District officials made it clear that the and that neither Altadena nor Sierra Madre was likely to get its own distinct seat.