A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has granted the city of Santa Monica’s motion to dismiss a decade-long voting rights lawsuit, dealing a major blow to civil rights advocates who sought to dismantle the city’s at-large election system in favor of neighborhood-based City Council districts.
In a ruling issued from the bench, Judge Daniel M. Crowley granted the city’s motion for judgment on the pleadings. Crowley directed defense counsel representing Santa Monica to prepare a formal written order reflecting the dismissal and circulate it to plaintiffs’ counsel for review.
The decision halts a sprawling dispute that has wound through every tier of California’s judicial system since 2016 when the Pico Neighborhood Association and longtime resident Maria Loya first filed the case. The plaintiffs alleged that electing all seven City Council members on an at-large, citywide plurality basis unlawfully diluted the voting power of minority residents — specifically Latino voters, who make up about 14% of the city’s voting population and are geographically concentrated in the Pico neighborhood.
Santa Monica’s motion, filed in August, seized on the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In that case, the nation’s highest court ruled that election-law challenges seeking race-conscious remedies under the 14th Amendment must be supported by evidence establishing a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred” in the adoption or maintenance of the challenged electoral system.
Attorneys representing Santa Monica, led by Kahn A. Scolnick of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, argued that federal equal-protection guarantees override state voting statutes and apply directly to the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, commonly known as the CVRA. The city maintained that the plaintiffs could not meet the heightened Callais threshold because the California Court of Appeal had already determined after a 2018 bench trial that the plaintiffs failed to prove Santa Monica adopted or maintained its at-large system for a discriminatory purpose.
Because the California Supreme Court denied review of that specific equal-protection finding in 2023, the absence of intentional discrimination became the binding “law of the case,” which lower courts cannot revisit on remand.
“Given the state of the record, the law of the case, and Plaintiffs’ concessions, this is the most straightforward possible CVRA case to resolve in the wake of Callais,” the city’s legal team wrote in its motion. “Plaintiffs seek to hold the City liable for adopting and maintaining an at-large electoral system based on the alleged effect that system has had on Latino voters. But the Court of Appeal in this case has already concluded ... that there’s no evidence that the City adopted or maintained its at-large electoral system for any racially discriminatory purpose.”
Plaintiffs’ counsel, led by Malibu attorney Kevin I. Shenkman and Laura L. Ho of Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho, forcefully resisted the motion. They argued that Callais was strictly confined to Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, a law derived from Congress’s enforcement powers under the 15th Amendment. In contrast, the plaintiffs said, California lawmakers passed the CVRA under the state’s broad police powers, explicitly writing into the statute that proof of discriminatory intent is not required to establish a violation.
The litigation has followed a turbulent path. After a six-week trial in 2018, a Superior Court judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in early 2019, declaring the citywide system unlawful and ordering Santa Monica to divide itself into seven voting districts. An appellate panel reversed that decision in 2020, concluding that the plaintiffs could not prove vote dilution because Latinos did not form an outright majority in any single proposed district.
In 2023, the California Supreme Court partially revived the case, rejecting the appellate court’s rigid “majority-minority” rule and setting new standards for evaluating both the dilution argument and whether potential remedies would benefit the protected class citywide or only in a specific district.
The high court sent the matter back for further proceedings, setting the stage for a retrial that was repeatedly paused to evaluate the constitutional impact of Callais.
The hearing was memorialized in a minute order — an administrative record drafted by the courtroom’s judicial assistant summarizing the bench proceedings, attorney appearances and the judge’s immediate verbal ruling. In California practice, a minute order serves as the court’s internal operational record, but when a judge orders the prevailing party to “prepare an order,” the minute order is interim in nature.
The forthcoming formal order — which defense counsel must draft, circulate to the plaintiffs for objection or approval as to form, and submit to the judge for signature — will serve as the binding, appealable legal instrument. Once signed and entered by the judge alongside a final judgment, it formally starts the statutory clock for postjudgment motions and appeals.