Currently, the City of San Luis Obispo’s Charter requires at-large elections to elect City Council Members and the Mayor. However, the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA), which was designed to address voter dilution caused by racial polarization in at-large elections, encourages cities with systems that dilute minority votes to switch to district-based elections.
In February 2023, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project demanded that the City create voting districts. The group argued that the City’s current at-large election system violates the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA), which aims to protect minority voters from having their votes diluted.
The decision to move to Citywide Single Vote instead of dividing San Luis Obispo into districts followed almost two years of negotiations between the City and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project focused on an alternative to district elections that both protects minority voting rights and preserved community wide collaboration and progress toward achieving City diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
The City’s voter and demographic data analysis concluded that splitting San Luis Obispo into districts is directly contrary to the purpose and intent of the CVRA, which aims to protect minority voters from having their votes diluted.
In fact, the largest minority group living in San Luis Obispo – the Latine* community – is not concentrated to any specific geographic areas, and dividing the city into districts could diminish this minority group of voters’ opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
The City Council ultimately approved a settlement agreement in November 2024 with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and agreed to change the current method of conducting local elections to the Citywide Single Vote method instead of creating voting districts. This settlement agreement helps the City avoid costly litigation while also ensuring that minority votes are not diluted in local elections.
If the City had not reached this settlement, its options would have been to implement districts satisfactory to SVREP, and likely not aligned with community desires, or to defend a potential CVRA lawsuit, which has been a losing proposition for other jurisdictions, costing them years of wasted effort and millions of taxpayer dollars. The City Council agreed that creating districts would only sow division in SLO and likely would disrupt the community’s significant progress toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion. Under a district election model, all voters would only cast one vote for a single Councilmember every four years, rather than every two years, and their one voting choice would be limited to candidates required to live in the same district as the voter.
Under the City’s current system, voters citywide cast two votes for two council seats and one vote for Mayor every two years. Under the new Citywide Single Vote system, San Luis Obispo will keep its citywide elections, while implementing a new voting method that elevates the potential of minority groups in the City to organize, participate in, and influence local elections, instead of dividing up the city into districts. This means that all eligible voters in the city will continue to cast one vote for Mayor, but, beginning in 2026, will cast only one vote for council, with the two council candidates receiving the most votes winning council seats.
