Story Created:
Jul 28, 2010 at 6:32 PM PST
Story Updated:
Jul 28, 2010 at 6:32 PM PST
The city of Inglewood’s June 8 mayoral primary election took an “only in Inglewood” turn last week when 23.63 percent of the votes cast were discarded and the election results were reordered to the horror of, not only 2,471 voters, but to the extreme dismay of the city’s state Senator, Roderick Wright.
In an interview Tuesday, Wright excoriated the Inglewood City Council for having egregiously tampered with the will of the people by removing from the lineup James Butts, the second-place finisher in the election, and discarding his votes.
The election was held to determine who will fill the six weeks remaining on the unexpired term of former Mayor Roosevelt Dorn. Eight candidates vied for the election and the top two finishers are slated to meet in a head-to-head contest for the truncated mayoral term on Aug. 31. Another election will be held in November to fill the first full four-year mayoral term since Dorn’s departure.
Wright, an Inglewood resident and admitted supporter of Councilman Danny Tabor, who finished first in the election with 2,744 votes, took intense umbrage at the actions of the council, which he envisions will lead to devastating lawsuits of various kinds against the city, as well as an embarrassing blot on Inglewood’s concept of democracy.
“They disenfranchised almost 2,500 people,” Wright said. “They put Butts’ name on the ballot, conducted an election in which he received the second highest number of citizens’ votes, after which the city clerk decides he shouldn’t have been on the ballot. Then the city council removes him from the election results and declares Councilwoman Judy Dunlap the second-place finisher! I am unaware of any law in America that would allow them to do that,” Wright said.
“I told Danny that this was wrong,” the senator continued. “Imagine not only the injustice done to Butts, but to all those people who voted for him. Suppose I had voted for Butts and my vote was thrown out. What makes the city council think that if Butts was never on the ballot I would have voted for Dunlap? I may have voted for Ralph Franklin or any of the other candidates or I may not have voted at all. The council had no business shoving Dunlap into Butts’ place and making up a runoff between her and Danny.”
“Every person who voted for Butts can sue the city of Inglewood for disenfranchisement, and how will the city defend itself against such lawsuits?” Wright asked. “It can’t,” he answered.
Wright said that in America — as opposed to some of those troubled African or Middle Eastern countries — if anything is deemed wrong with an election, all the results are thrown out and the entire election is held again, from scratch. “You don’t have people throwing out votes and rearranging the order of finish,” Wright said. “It’s bizarre.”
“The issues in this mess are quite clear,” Wright continued. “Butts presented himself at the city clerk’s office as a potential candidate for mayor. Is he eligible to run? The city clerk said, ‘Yes.’ She took his filing fee, signed him up and put his name on the ballot. Then she comes back weeks later and says, ‘Oops, I made a mistake. He’s not eligible to run.‘ Whose fault is that? Not Butts’ and certainly not the citizens who voted for him, whose rights the city ultimately trampled. No. This was wrong — really wrong.”
I reminded the senator that city clerks in other cities are low-key, unobtrusive officials who run elections that come off smoothly year after year, yet Inglewood’s city clerk, Yvonne Horton, never fails to be the hub of controversy whenever residents take to the polls where she works. Particularly galling to many residents is the fact that Horton runs the election in which she is running. I asked Wright if there is anything the state Legislature can do to stop that practice.
Having previously researched the problem, Wright said: “She should not be doing that. Inglewood is a charter city and as such, operates around many state laws. All the other cities in the state who have elected city clerks have their own ordinances that require the city clerk to turn over the election function of the office to someone else when he or she is running for re-election. Inglewood has no such ordinance.
“It is important that whoever is running our elections be not only innocent of any wrongdoing, but even be beyond the perception of any wrongdoing and that’s why other cities do not allow their city clerks to be anywhere near elections when their names are on the ballot.
“If Yvonne Horton is to stop running her own elections, the Inglewood City Council must enact an ordinance forbidding her to do so,” Wright said. “The same city council that disenfranchised the people?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered.
Apart from the overriding disenfranchisement issue that troubles the senator, legal observers of this latest round of Inglewood madness foresee other lawsuits the city could face. They say the citizens can sue the city council for conflict of interest because three of the four members who stripped Butts of his second place runoff slot were on the ballot against him: Tabor, Dunlap and Franklin. That troika gives the perception of acting to keep an “outsider” from among its midst.
Observers concede that Butts, himself, can sue the city now or he can sue it later. He can sue now to resolve the matter of whether he was or was not eligible to be on the June 8 ballot in the first place, or he can sue after the November election for the full term mayorship. If Butts loses the November election, in which he intends to run, he can sue Inglewood, contending that he lost in November because of what the city council did to him in July.
But in an interview with me Monday, an unbelievably serene and “not bitter” Butts took the high road about the events surrounding him and is choosing not to sue — at this time.
“My main objective is to serve the city in the capacity of mayor for the full four-year term, and to litigate this matter would have been a distraction in terms of cost, time and effort,” Butts said. “Also, it would drag the city into court and cause them to spend money that they don’t have on me and on fighting this ligation. So, my objective is to do what’s best for the community.”
(Next week: Who is James Butts and why are city officials making such perilous moves to keep him out?)
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