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. r ~/r;L San Marcos Election Analysis - Final Report / January 10, 1994 / Page 3 municipal elections since the early 1980s. And perhaps most importantly, for each group, preferred candidates have been elected more often than not. The other question we addressed is how ethnic minority candidates fared in the 29 elections we examined. The underlying concern here, of course, is whether Anglo voters, who constitute the demographic majority in the City, voted effectively and consistently as a bloc over the 13-year period under study to deny ethnic minority c- candidates election to office. This concern arises from key provisions of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act (as amended) and subsequent voting rights case law. The 1988 Place 5 General can be used to illustrate the nature of this concern. In this race, Moore, an Anglo, outpolled Nicola, an ethnic minority, by just over 500 votes. More significantly, however, when we look at who the three racial/ethnic groups supported, we find that Moore took 87.4% of the Anglo vote, while Nicola garnered 81.5% of the Hispanic vote. (Black support, which could not be reliably determined, is numerically insignificant in this illustration.) In these numbers, we see an Hispanic candidate losing to an Anglo candidate with sizable Anglo support. Taking this election out of context, we could easily conclude that Anglo voters had voted effectively to deny Nicola election to office. Indeed, if the City had a history of election outcomes of this sort, where an ethnic minority candidate was defeated by an Anglo candidate with significant Anglo backing, despite substantial support from ethnic minority voters, then serious questions might be raised with respect to federal voting rights compliance. { The question is, what sort of election history does the City have in this area? Of the 29 contested City elections between 1980 and 1993, 15 involved an ethnic minority candidate (specifically, an Hispanic candidate). Table 1 identifies each of these 15 elections and presents our estimates of the racial/ethni.c support for each minority candidate. In our analysis of Table 1, we found that: 0 Hispanic voters routinely supported Hispanic candidates. Indeed, there was just one exception between 1980 and 1993. Rodriguez-Scales, the Hispanic candidate in the 1992 Mayor General, polled only about 48% of the Hispanic vote. ' 0 Of the 6 elections for which majority/plurality Black support could be reliably determined, Black voters supported Hispanic candidates 4 times. While this might suggest Black-Hispanic political cohesiveness, the particular elections involved are relatively small in number and not necessarily representative of the larger election pool (noting how the 6 "usable" elections were "selected" from the 15 available for analysis). Nevertheless, these results certainly do not preclude the possibility of Black-Hispanic cohesiveness in races involving Hispanic candidates. 0 Anglo voters generally did not support Hispanic candidates, but neither did they vote consistently as a bloc against these candidates. Indeed, in 3 of the 15 elections, Anglo voters favored the Hispanic candidate. Furthermore, in still another 6 of the 15 elections, Hispanic candidates enjoyed reasonably good "cross-over" support from Anglo voters, garnering anywhere from 20% to 30% of the Anglo vote. This is hardly evidence of a strong Anglo voting bloc effectively and consistently opposing Hispanic candidates.