Logo courtesy of the City of Live Oak

LIVE OAK, CA (MPG) - The City of Live Oak is challenging the basis of a California Voting Rights Act complaint, arguing in a newly released letter that the city’s single precinct structure makes it impossible to prove racially polarized voting, a key element in CVRA litigation.

In an April 3 letter to voting rights attorney Kevin Shenkman, Special Counsel Martin Koczanowicz said Shenkman’s March 13 demand offered general assertions but no data showing that Latino voters in Live Oak are politically cohesive or that their preferred candidates are routinely defeated by bloc voting from other voters. Koczanowicz wrote that because the city has only one voting precinct, there is no way to perform any statistical analysis to determine whether polarized voting exists.

Shenkman’s demand, sent on behalf of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and Live Oak resident Cruz Mora, gives the city until May 5 to adopt a resolution of intent to transition to district elections or face a lawsuit. 

Mora, 26, is a Live Oak High School graduate with a bachelor’s degree in public administration from California State University, Chico. He works as an analyst for the State of California and serves on the Sutter County Democratic Central Committee. Mora has run for City Council four times, most recently finishing third in a five‑candidate race.

While city council races are nonpartisan, Sutter County’s February 2025 registration report showed 42 percent Republican and 29 percent Democratic voters, with overall registration at 81.56 percent. In CVRA cases, partisan data is sometimes cited to illustrate voting patterns, though courts focus primarily on race rather than party affiliation.

The city’s April 3 letter outlines three questions it says must be answered affirmatively for a CVRA claim to move forward: whether the protected class votes as a bloc, whether the non‑protected class votes as a bloc to defeat the protected class’s preferred candidates, and whether another election system would give the protected class a better opportunity to elect those candidates. With a single precinct, Koczanowicz wrote, there is no data that can be extrapolated to answer those questions.

Several small cities have already faced CVRA challenges and voluntarily shifted to district elections, including Guadalupe, population about 7,000, which adopted districts in 2018 after receiving a demand letter, according to City of Guadalupe Resolution 2018‑13. The City of Coalinga, population roughly 8,000 at the time, also transitioned to district elections after receiving a CVRA demand letter, with its city attorney advising the Coalinga City Council in 2015 that the city was unlikely to prevail if sued. Both cities cited the cost of litigation and the CVRA’s “low legal threshold” in their decisions to switch, and neither attempted to defend their at-large systems in court.

Small school districts have also been required to end at-large elections under the CVRA, including Ramona Unified School District, where a judge in the Jauregui v. City of Palmdale case accepted testimony from voting rights statisticians hired by the plaintiffs who determine voting patterns. The court in 2014 found that their analysis was sufficient even with very limited precinct data.

Live Oak’s April 3 response follows a similar letter the city sent in January rejecting Mora’s earlier demand. In that correspondence, Koczanowicz said Mora had not identified which minority group was allegedly disenfranchised and had provided no demographic or election data to support his claim. The city maintains that neither Mora nor Shenkman has supplied the evidence needed to demonstrate racially polarized voting.

Shenkman, who has litigated more than 175 CVRA cases statewide, has warned that if the city does not adopt a resolution of intent by May 5, he will seek judicial relief.