The Monterey Herald offers this report, which begins: “Monterey County supervisors, despite a barrage of personal barbs, decided Tuesday to remove Measure C, a ballot measure regarding the controversial Rancho San Juan development, from the county’s June ballot. The 4-1 vote, with Supervisor Dave Potter dissenting, sets up a new round of lawsuits over a blossoming conflict between county land-use policies and compliance with Spanish-language requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act.” Meanwhile, in Redlands California, a judge ruled “that a petition for a proposed ballot initiative to protect land in the South Hills was invalid because it was not translated into Spanish. The decision came a day after a San Bernardino Superior Court judge ruled that referendums on two housing and retail projects totaling about 300 acres were flawed because they violated the state Elections Code. The referendums were scheduled to appear on the June 6 ballot in which voters also will elect three council members.”
This is exactly the problem I warned about in this Dec. 12, 2005 oped in the Los Angeles Times (“A little-noticed ruling from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last month threatens to throw a monkey wrench into California’s initiative process, and it has already been used by City Council members in Rosemead to block a recall election”). I urged the Ninth Circuit panel deciding Padilla v. Lever to reconsider its ruling en banc, and “at the very least, the 9th Circuit panel should apply this ruling only to initiatives or recall petitions not already qualified to be in circulation.”
Still, however, no ruling on the en banc requests in the Ninth Circuit. This kind of uncertainty should not stand.
Comments:

Todd Kunoika writes:

Thank you for continued coverage of the implications of this court decisions.
What I want to know is, why doesn’t anybody else care? The only mention in the L.A. Times of the Rosemead recall election getting derailed was in your December opinion piece, and that was before the then-mayor of Rosemead sued his own city and got the federal district court involved]. They haven’t written anything since then about the court decisions that have effectively killed our recall, nor have they written about the initiative up in Monterey County getting derailed.
Don’t they [and by “they,” I mean both the L.A. Times and the Ninth Circuit] realize that the court decision, as it stands, threatens the ability of citizen-initiated recall and referendum petition drives across the entire Ninth Circuit? Don’t they realize that anything qualified for the June ballot, and dozens of petitions currently being circulated for the November ballot, are all going to be subjected to legal challenges across most of the Ninth Circuit [since I would suspect the vast majority of the people living in the Ninth Circuit live in areas subject to sec. 203 requirements of the Voting Rights Act for multilingual voting materials]? Don’t they realize that it is now completely impossible to prepare a petition for recall that is consistent with existing state law and yet also consistent with the holding of Padilla v. Lever? A two hundred word notice of intention and a two hundred word response, written in legible, eight-point, English, turns into the equivalent of eight-hundred “words” in Vietnamese or Chinese, and can not be fit on a single sheet of legal-sized paper. And you certainly can’t fit the material and still have room for any signatures.
IIt’s almost as though everyone is assuming that this problem will just go away. And, in the meantime, I need to put up with perhaps another year of those smug and hypocritical turkeys sitting on the dais of my city council. . . .
Todd Kunioka