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Associated Press

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Petitions used for the 2003 recall of a Latino Santa Ana school trustee should have been printed in Spanish as well as English, an appellate court has ruled.

The trustee, Nativio V. Lopez, had come under fire for seeking exemptions to the state's English-only instruction requirements and was partly blamed for the district's lack of new school construction. He was recalled by 71 percent of voters.

The decision Wednesday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals could be used to force election officials throughout the state to require multiple-language petitions for ballot issues, voting-rights advocates said.

It means "non-English-speaking voters have the opportunity to participate in the entire electoral process, from beginning - which often means deciding whether to sign a petition - to end, in the voting booth," said former Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorney Thomas Saenz, who represented the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Orange County Registrar of Voters.

The decision did not grant a new election to Lopez. But it overturned a lower court's ruling that the civil rights of three Latino voters were not violated when they mistakenly signed a recall petition written in English.

The voters - Sandra Padilla, Victor Sanchez and Rosa Andrade - alleged that signature gatherers misled them by saying the petition was merely a request for more information in the recall.

Their lawsuit claimed the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 required the petition be written in a language they understood. A three-judge panel of the appellate court agreed 2 to 1.

The defendants argued the Voting Rights Act did not apply because the recall petition was circulated by private individuals and was not official voting material.

The dissenting judge, William C. Canby, said the plaintiffs could have rescinded their signatures, as one did, or voted no in the recall election.

John Eastman, a constitutional law scholar at Chapman University Law School, said the ruling doesn't invalidate the election because Lopez's term expired in 2004. But the ruling may allow Lopez to sue the county for monetary damages, he said.

Lopez said he was pleased by the ruling.

"I've moved on with my life, but I'm confident this ruling will help someone else in a future election," he said.