1 David Yakobson
From: Jason Mastbaum <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2024 8:45 AM
To: councilmtgitems
Subject: 9/9/2024 item 4a
EXTERNAL
In a Santa Monica Lookout article posted yesterday evening, Kevin Shenkman is quoted as saying "Had the defendant changed their election system back in 2016, I would have -- my many colleagues that have worked on this case over the last eight and a half years would have gotten paid zero dollars and every one of them would have been content with it."
https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/News-2024/September2024/09_09_2024_Voting_Rights_Judge_Issues_Dire_Warning.html This raised my eyebrow as sounding a hell of a lot like Shenkman lied to the judge, considering the extensive reporting about how he sends invoices with his initial CVRA demand letter. He's not a civil rights crusader, unless "Kevin Shenkman gets paid" is now a civil right. “Picture me rollin’, bitches.”
Shenkman exulted in the victory, posting an image of the seven-figure check on Facebook along with that line from Tupac Shakur.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/malibu-lawyer-elections-18533273.php At first, Deidre Siguenza couldn’t make sense of the legal threat against her school district, even though she’s a lawyer.
The threat arrived in the mail in October 2017: a brief, blunt letter.
It was addressed to her, as clerk and past president of the school board in Martinez, her small hometown in the East Bay.
The sender was an attorney in Malibu she’d never heard of, Kevin Shenkman.
Item 4-A
September 10, 2024
Item 4-A
September 10, 2024
2 The letter made allegations about the way the board conducted its elections. It mentioned race, discrimination against Latino voters and a state law called the California Voting Rights Act.
Shenkman said he would sue the school system unless it changed its election rules and paid him $30,000 for pointing out the violation. In a follow-up letter, he even included an invoice. “It was just kind of: Wow?” recalled Siguenza, who is Filipina. “Where did this come from?” Over the next year, people in Martinez would learn about the most powerful state law that many Californians have never heard of — one created with the admirable goal of protecting and empowering minority voters.
Yet a yearlong examination of the law by the Chronicle found that it is achieving mixed results, and that because of how it’s designed — with generous financial incentives for legal action and no state tracking of outcomes — California’s election landscape is being shaped by a small group of plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Shenkman and several colleagues have made more than $15 million from CVRA lawsuits and settlements in the past decade, public records show. And they’ve won so often that local officials have basically stopped fighting back. As soon as a board receives a letter like the one that landed in Martinez, local officials usually agree to change their election rules and pay the lawyer $30,000. They do it even if the letters contain factual mistakes, like identifying Latinos as whites and vice versa, because the alternative is to get sued. So the merits of these cases rarely get debated or scrutinized. ...
After switching to districts, the diversity of the Martinez school board has fluctuated. Two white members resigned, and two Filipino members did not seek re-election. A Latina candidate, Yazmin Llamas, ran for a board seat and won. Carlos Melendez was appointed in a mostly white district; he is a registered Republican and a “2nd generation Hispanic American,” he wrote in an email. The board today is three fifths white.
Rossi said she still doesn’t understand why they were targeted under the CVRA. Instead of helping the schools in Martinez, the state law seemed mainly to have empowered a wealthy lawyer in Malibu.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/california-voting-law Item 4-A
September 10, 2024
Item 4-A
September 10, 2024