June 15, 2022 Elections Commission Meeting

1. Call to Order & Roll Call
welcome to the june 15 2022 regular meeting of the san francisco elections
commission this meeting is being held in person at city hall room 408
1 dr carlton b goodlett place san francisco california 94102
as authorized by california government code section 54953e
and mayor breed's 45th supplement to her february 25th 2020 emergency
proclamation it is possible that some members of the elections commission may attend this meeting remotely
in that event those members will participate in vote by video members of the public may attend the
meeting to observe and provide public comment at the physical meeting location listed above or online
instructions for providing public comment are on the agenda in addition to participating in real
time interested persons are encouraged to participate in this meeting by submitting public comment in writing by
12 p.m on june 15 2022 to martha delgadillo at sfgov.org
secretary delgadillo uh can you explain some procedures for today's remote and
and in person meeting please okay thank you vice president chapel the minister of this meeting will reflect that this
meeting is being held in person at city hall room 408 one dr carlton b goodlatte place san
francisco california 94102 it is possible that some members
of the elections commission may attend this meeting remotely in addition to participating in real time interested
persons are encouraged to participate in this meeting by submitting public comment and writing by 12 pm on june 15
2022 to martha del video passive dot org
it will be shared with the commission after this meeting has concluded that will be included as part of the official
meeting file so the comment will be available on each item on this agenda each member of the
public will be allowed three minutes to speak comments or opportunities to speak
during the public commentary are available via home law and following
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page 5 of the agenda thank you vice president champion great uh with that i'll call the meeting
to order uh secretary delgado can you please proceed with the roll call sure
vice president chapel here commissioner bernholds your
commissioner guy here commissioner dragonic here
president okay what's like is uh president we have the metform wonderful
all right uh before we get started thank you to commissioner jerdonek for filling in and sharing the last meeting uh
commissioner bernholtz thanks for joining remotely i have eyes on you so if you need anything just let me know
2. General Public Comment
okay we'll start with the second agenda item general public comment public comment on any issue within the election
commission's general jurisdiction that is not covered by another item on this agenda
i will start with those in attendance in person and then move on to those attending remotely you'll have three
minutes please state your name at the start
do i need to turn that mic on is it on it's fine great okay thank you
all right thank you very much hello commissioners good evening my name is brent turner i was uh
a volunteer uh communications director for open voting
consortium starting back in 2005 uh around the time that this open source
issue became uh first came in front of the commission and and the county um i wanted to make a
comment uh at the last meeting uh commissioner bernholtz uh with all due
respect made a statement uh casting what we call in the software community some
fear uncertainty and doubt regarding open source software environments
i put in a note to the package that references the comment but the comment
may be not may not be clear at the risk of paraphrasing ice i i think the
commissioner mentioned that basically if an open source system was created
it is possible that people wouldn't show up to actually look at the code and therefore there may be a question as to
the realities of the open source community we just as the public representing the open source community
we want to just highlight that statement and make sure that it's addressed directly
that line is what we call a throwaway line that's been part of the microsoft
statement toward open source um you remember years back you might have heard that bill
gates accused the open source community of being communists um well another line
is that open source is no panacea if you ever hear anybody say that that is certainly true as very few remedies are
complete panaceas so that's what we call a throwaway line and this one as well
casting aspersion regarding a possible lack of engagement by the open source
community i just wanted to bring that to your attention uh this
this commission has been great for years leading the country the state the country on this issue and we want to
make sure that we stand strong and and don't have any misinformation entering
the picture or at least as as little misinformation as possible so thank you for your
uh time bernholtz thank you uh vice president chapel i'd
like to respond to that um it's a legitimate question i don't appreciate the uh
aspersions being of of association that are contained in that comment it's not a
question or a comment raised by any affiliation i have none with microsoft corporation or
any such others and it's a well-known fact that open source software uh many parts of open source software are
solely dependent on the volunteer efforts of of well-intentioned very diligent
sustainers and maintainers who work very hard it's also very true that the governance
of open source software is as important as the code itself so i'm not speaking on anyone else's behalf i'm simply
raising a question and i think it's behooves this commission to be sure that both
decisions about code are made in line with the
commission's policy to pursue open source software but to never ever uh
pretend that open source software is a silver bullet it's not a panacea and it must be uh
paid uh great attention to the governance of that software and to in fact make sure that people do
uh take the opportunity to review the code and maintain the code and to raise that question is to simply do my job it
is not to affiliate myself with any organization or any others who may have
somehow earned mr turner's disregard
it is a legitimate question being asked with legitimate concern for the uh free
fair and functional elections of the commission and i don't appreciate any other uh allegations or um hints thank
you thank you commissioner bernholtz i don't see any other public commenters in the
room so martha can you please move on to those um attending remotely sure
can you hear me now yes we can hear you great david pillpowell i have no general
public comment just a technical issue i could hear the commissioners including commissioner bernholds on
uh webex i could not hear uh martha so if artha could pull her
microphone over and be sure that the mic is on so that it's all uh piping through
the audio that would be great and it was very important stuff and i wanted to hear it so anyway
that that's all for now you'll hear from me more later thanks can you hear me david i can
okay thank you all right thank you okay bye
next caller oh mr rothman i'm going to unmute you you will have three minutes to comment
okay thank you my name is richard rothman and this might be a little outside your
well i'm going to propose it anyway you know it was in reference to proposition
c on the ballot that supervisor peskin uh since we seem to be in the recall
mode now for and how do the replacements and i don't
think the mayor should do the replacements and i was thinking since the the commissioners are each appointed
separately by an elected official the same as the ethics commission that maybe
either your commission or the ethics commission could interview in and appoint a
replacement in this way it would be seem more fair since each of you represent a
different elected official and it's too late to put it on the ballot now but uh it's just something to
think about um you know the people who were against c were uh very adamant that
they wanted uh the person could run again for uh the office and if you want
to do that fine but i just think we need a more uh simpler and fair way to
to appoint a person whose recall and if you want them to run
again you can say that or not but it's something to think about and thank
you for letting me speak
thank you we have no other callers with their hands raised okay
3. Discussion and Possible Action on Resolution on Continuation of Remote Elections Commission Meetings
great uh then we will move on to agenda item number three
discussion and possible action on resolution on continuation of remote elections commission meetings
uh the resolution is in the packet i'm not going to re-read it at this meeting
can i have a motion from someone on the commission
i move that we approve the motion in the packet second second wonderful
okay i think okay we go to public comment yes yes
there's no one in person anyone on the phone no i don't see any hatreds okay let's
take them out okay so uh vice president chapel how do you
vote yes commissioner bernholds yes commissioner die aye commissioner
jordan yes and commissioner shapiro yes okay with five votes in the affirmative
passes wonderful okay
4. Election of Commission Executive Officers
moving on to agenda item number four election of commission executive
officers discussion and possible action to elect a commission president and vice
president if needed for article five of the commission bylaws her the bylaws the
terms shall begin immediately at the conclusion of the meeting uh first let me say thank you to
commissioner bernholtz for her year and a half of service and leadership as as former president
uh your guidance has been instrumental uh personally and to the commission
the procedure is set out in the agenda i'm going to open nominations for president now
anyone who wishes to nominate a candidate or nominate themselves can state their name
i will start by saying that i am more than happy to serve as president
um so anyone else would like a stab in it throw your name out into the ring
no i nominate you okay um
and and note for the public's information that we don't have succession written into our bylaws so
that's right so there is no automatic ascension ascension
okay um anna do we take do we take public comment or just we need a second i think
oh do we need a second oh okay second a second okay
should we do for vice president now and then public comment or should we do it individually
do it together okay okay cool um so then similarly
do we have any nominations for vice president
but we should do the vote for president christie i think
oh were you saying that we do public comment together or we saying we do the vote together
so we can do nominations for vp then take public comment then do those two separate votes okay
okay uh so any nominations or self nominations for vice
president i nominate commissioner jurdonek for vice president
and are you willing to serve um thank you sure i'll serve thank you commissioner
day and i would also nominate commissioner shapiro if she would be interested
yes okay so we have two
um okay so then we will take public comment on both uh
president and vice president and then we'll move on to votes
okay i think we have a commenter in person
hello commissioners brent turner um supporting um the both nominations of uh
uh i believe commissioner chapel and commissioner gerdonic thank you
and no further commenters in person so martha if you can move on to those attending remotely
okay so we do have one caller with their hand raised i will unmute you caller and you have three minutes to comment
can you hear me now yes okay david bill fell again i moved over
to the computer this time um so when the question was put about the procedure and
dca flores alpine i could not hear her comment so when she has something to say
you got to share the microphone please please please um i certainly uh support
the the divided question here on on vice president chapel and i'm sure she'll do
a fine job uh and i'm choosing not to weigh in on um
the the vice president uh candidates both the commissioners here donating shapiro either way would do a fine job
anyone who's willing to put in the time at this point to try to you know keep the ship afloat uh is fine by me so
um thank you for listening bye later thank you mr popo
we don't have anything for you okay uh thank you
so first we'll do the vote for president so uh since there's only one you'll just
say i guess yes or no so martha can you take the vote please so
just to be clear we're voting for president now or for myself
how do you vote yes okay commissioner bernholds yes
commissioner dye yes commissioner jerdonek yes and
commissioner shapiro yes okay with five votes in the affirmative it passes the motion passes
okay now for vice president uh your vote will be for either uh commissioner
gerdonic or commissioner shapiro and if someone has four votes they will be
elected if not we will do another vote
okay martha can you do another pass
yes so now you'll ask us will each vote oh okay i see okay so vice president chapel you vote for uh
commissioner jordan or commissioner shapiro commissioner shapiro and uh commissioner bernholes
commissioner shapiro commissioner dai
commissioner jordanic commissioner jedonik
um commissioner and commissioner shapiro
commissioner shapiro okay so with three performances for commissioner shapiro
okay no though and two pretty commissioner all we have to do
so this is dca florida's the bylaws do call for is there an echo
the bible the commission's bylaws call for a majority vote um so a majority
vote would be four right so we
we need four total votes no one neither of the two neither of the two votes so
we can talk and then yes we'll take a re-vote yes okay
so commissioner jedonik your your history of service with the
commission is is well documented and exemplary my reasoning for voting for commissioner
shapiro was simply because you're getting close to the end of your term and i thought it would be helpful to have someone who could potentially do
multiple years since it's typically a multi-year kind of role so that was my thinking
i don't know if anyone else wants to provide any thought kind of any reasoning behind their votes
so my reasoning was actually to go with experience because i believe um the terms are actually one year if i recall
they're one-year terms yeah practice has typically been kind of two years but at
least while i've been on here and kind of what i was told going into it so as someone who's come from a very public
commission that rotated leadership um you know i i see no reason why we have
to make the term longer than a year it's a one-year term according to our
bylaws and i i think given the
the disruption that we've had in the last few meetings that it would be useful to have experience and i think
there will be opportunities for everyone to serve so that was my reason
can i just ask a clarifying question is the term until january 1st or is it
until a year from today that's a good question
yeah it's both of them really
what was the answer i lost maybe silence on that right so i i think we can decide
actually i think the bylaws say that they're elected every january
um so that that is what the bylaws say however um
in a situation of vacancy the bylaws are silent about whether that
restarts the clock or whether that would be
because technically if they if you're up in january that would be two terms
you're serving right um so the bylaws are silent on that and the
commission may amend the bylaws to clarify that um in the future but since they are silent uh i would
definitely probably go with whatever your bylaws do state which is every january okay so yeah we assume this is a
six month term essentially yeah and just to clarify my term ends in a year and a half so
i i still have plenty of time to like serve a full term of it
i would say that just for consistent with bylaws that we make it a six month term and
yep agreed and you know we can choose to rotate so okay
i will say um i'm i appreciate the um recognition and um also just
trust um from commissioner bernholtz and uh or sorry
yes commissioner reynolds and vice president slash president um chapel
um and also i think commissioner jardonic obviously would be phenomenal
as well um i have a lot of passion and energy for
this commission regardless of my capacity though i do have a lot of desire to come in and
roll my sleeves up and whether it's vice president or continuing as a commissioner but i would be privileged
and humbled to help get a fresh start with what is now i think a majority of a
new group of people um so um yeah thank you for the opportunity to
potentially have that um and just in defense of my own nomination
i've as has been mentioned i've been serving for about eight and a half years and i'm proud to say that i've only
missed a single meeting during that time and i think i was only late only once
but um i have been vice president twice before and also president twice before
and i also do a lot of support behind the scenes and supporting the secretary and helping
incoming presidents and i'm happy to help
you know educate people on on how the process works but i would be honored to just
serve a little bit more in my past in my last year and a half because the last time i served as an officer was
i think it was like five years ago or so
thanks i'm happy to support you on that
i perhaps can work with you on learning more of the ropes so that in six months perhaps
we can talk and explore what that might look like in the future
thank you uh okay so we will take a revote unless uh
commissioner bernholtz you have anything to add okay an expressive face all right
so should we take public comment nope oh we've already taken public comments so we'll just do another reboot okay
so um president buzz
how do you vote uh commissioner gerdonic okay uh commissioner bernd knowles
commissioner jerdonek commissioner dye commissioner jerdoneck
listener donna commissioner
all right thank you congratulations commissioner churdonic look forward to serving with
you uh passing the torch uh all right so uh we'll move on to agenda item
5. Approval of Minutes of Previous Meetings
number five approval of minutes of previous meetings discussion and possible action on the minutes of the
commission's february 14 2022 regular meeting and april 6 2022 special
meetings
all right so i had already given martha a heads up uh i just had two minor items
uh one voting works is one word uh so it's in yes i'd like to
amend the current draft and correct voting works name
uh and also if we could change motion to moved
where it appears twice in items uh it's okay form five otherwise it looked good
to minor titles okay otherwise it looked good okay thank you commissioner dye um
unless there's any other comments from the commission we'll go on to public comment
nope okay no one in person so martha can you go to public comments sure um i'm going to meet you caller um i'm
sure this is mr bill it is david pillpell
i hope you can hope you can hear me okay uh so just to follow up for uh one second on the
previous issue since there wasn't a second opportunity for uh public comment uh perhaps uh in her new capacity as
president uh president chapel will review the uh members of beaupac and
maybe commissioner shapiro could be armed twisted into serving on our chariot
into nudge um as to the minutes i would note that they were only posted yesterday i
haven't had a whole lot of time to go over them there were a couple of things that i noticed right off the bat on the
february minutes the header at the top left doesn't align with the
membership of the commission at that time i believe that was either commissioner mogi's last meeting or
second to last and uh member dai was not yet a member of the
commission in uh february so that should be a line and there was
some other stuff about spelling and whatnot and both stuff anyway i'm happy to
do a pass on the minutes if you want to approve them uh tonight with the understanding that uh non-substantive um
edits can be made by the commission's secretary with the approval of
i don't know president chapel or somebody uh or uh it could be
both sets could be put off again but i think it would be really helpful in the future to have the minutes available
when the other documents are posted so it's not like on 24 hours that we have
and if they're not ready they're not ready and i recognize that it took hours and hours to go through that uh big
meeting with the hundreds of speakers and the peppa pig and it's just yeah so the good news is that we have minutes
that reflect the record of what happened at the meetings bad news is it takes a while to get there but we should get
there and do it right just like counting ballots we should get the right answer it's not the fast answer so
take all of that for what you will thanks for listening and thank you martha and everybody
thank you so just for the record um i was actually appointed on february 10th so i actually
was a commissioner as of that meeting on february
um and i had sent a bunch of um edits for the april meeting some of
them were substantive so i wonder we should wait on the april ones i think we'll wait on april 6th
that's also longer so i'm sure members of the public will have a little bit longer to do on february 14th it sounds like we are
substantively in agreement we have some minor formatting and kind of
typographical changes so uh i would think that we would feel
comfortable approving those minutes with uh you know subject to those changes which martha and i will make together
if if any commissioner is comfortable with that and wants to move
that would be great so moved i mean that we approved the february 14
2022 drop minutes second perfect uh and we have taken public comment on
this item so martha can you go to a vote please vice president i'm sorry president chapel how do you vote yes
commissioner burnholes yes
the motion passes wonderful thank you everyone
6. Dominion Voting Systems Contract Extension
moving on to item number six dominion voting systems contract extension
discussion and possible action regarding the extension period for the city and county of san francisco's contract with
dominion voting systems commissioner jerdonek do you want to intro this item sure thank you
president chapel so this is an item that we've discussed a few times before
and at the last meeting we um did not discuss it because
you were away and we didn't have a chance to sit down with you but since the last meeting um we did
have a chance to sit down and just discuss the resolution and um
so the resolution draft that's a part of the packet today is basically the same
as what was presented or i should say attached to the packet of the last
meeting with the exception of a clause at the very end that's double underlined
and this was a way of addressing director arn's concern that he expressed two
meetings ago that he was wanted to make sure that he wasn't up
against a deadline in the last year and not having a voting system
so just basically expressing that we support ensuring that the department has a voting system in place like well in
advance of that election um that would follow that second year
extension so um president chappell did you want to say anything else about the resolution
yeah uh thank you commissioner jordanic and thank you for for working on the draft of this and a couple different
formats uh i think this addressed some of the concerns that were raised when it was initially brought up about
uh you know not including anything that would kind of be
a message we didn't want to send about a system that we would in fact be using and i think it also
adds that language kind of in deference to director arts and what he needs to accomplish from a
kind of operational perspective i think the one the two clauses that
commissioner jerdonek and i talked a little bit about and i would kind of specifically raise to the commission
are on page two uh the whereas clauses at at line 10 and line 14.
um i think we both you know we have not made any kind of resp you
know statement about those comments made by the dominion sales rep we've grappled
with that a bit um i don't think it's misplaced in this resolution but i don't necessarily think
it's necessary in this resolution so i think question you know a more specific question of the
commission is how we feel about those items and you know whether we want to retain them
if we do ultimately approve this resolution
could i just add one comment on that yeah yeah and i did we did discuss this together when we sat down and um i can
kind of go either way on it i feel like it's like president chapel said it's not totally necessary but at the same time
if we do include it i feel like that maybe adequate response to um
to kind of close that issue whereas if we don't include it i feel like
it seems like we we still need to do something more with respect to that
you know resolving that kind of outstanding issue so i feel like if it's in there then we
can kind of set this aside we've stated this on the record but if it's not in there then
we kind of need to do something more i think
i think that's an excellent point so i i would support leaving it in then
okay i didn't know their comments then uh do we have any motions
okay well i move that we adopt the resolution as revised in the packet
do you have a second second okay great then we'll move on to public comments i think we'll have a commenter
in public
hello commissioners brent turner and thanks for indulging me um some of these comments
seem to get redundant but for the sake of clarity within the record i just want to mention that the public supports
um this uh move ahead by the commission and and um
i just want to sort of recap a little what happened here for those that might
not be clear it's not that where anybody is picking
on dominion in particular the problem is is that
all three major companies that control the united states voting system market
um are operating on outdated software so we're we're dealing with a company that
not only is selling something to us that is outdated they're also price gouging
at the same time on top of that they're making comments through their
representative steve bennett public comments that this commission is
ignorant which is offensive and that san francisco voters don't care about
elections which is also incorrect and offensive um they
have been very very uh forward in
mentioning that john arndt and the department of elections are dominion's well-oiled machine
and and i think all these statements taken together um deserve a response and i've noted that
steve bennett nor dominion has decided to come forward and come here and defend anything any of these statements
we're thick-skinned and and you know this wouldn't be the the the uh
end of the world just these statements but the the problem for dominion is now that
whereas before we are trying to have the government create an open source system now a
non-profit has come along uh voting works and is willing to give effort here right on point so we're
just hopeful that again this commission sticks with the tradition for the past
14 15 years of leading the state and the country on this issue and and stand
strong and does not give dominion any benefit of any doubt when
it comes to contract as i think commissioner jerdonek has
been leading in pointing out there are ways to manicure the contract to best position the county rather than give in
to dominion thank you all right commissioner bernholtz
oh we can't hear you commissioner bernhardt thanks i don't know if you want to finish public comment before
my comment okay that's fine uh we'll move on to public comment from those attending remotely okay so we do have
one caller on the line i believe it's mr bill powell okay you are unmuted and you have three minutes to comment
great thank you um i'm just reading the document i'm assuming that
um [Music] the motion is to approve the resolution
with the uh changes so for example line two would strike uh
i'm sorry page two would strike lines one through nine and make the other uh changes
um i am assuming that's correct i am not particularly concerned with the
whereas pauses just to resolve clauses on page three the first resolve clause that the
commission supports extending i assume that that is merely stating the
commission's policy the commission can determine its policy but not
direct the director in a particular way with respect to
contracts that are under his sold jurisdiction
and in the final result requesting the board to extend the contract only one year this year i'm not
sure if the one-year contract extension would require board approval under
charter section 9.118 that
turns in part on the amount of money involved in the length of time so um i don't know if uh vca flora's
weigh in on that um but i think uh as i say that it's important that the
commission state clearly what its policy is and let the rest of the process run uh however
it runs without running into the non-interference clause of the
charter with respect to contracts and day-to-day administration of the department it gets a little
tricky and perhaps a little guidance might help
thanks for listening
okay i don't see any other hands raised okay uh commissioner bernholtz
did uh thank you does um dca flores want to
chime in on mr pilpel's question
so uh we don't provide legal advice to the members of the public um however if the commission has a question uh
you can ask it and i can respond well let me ask it then i mean um i want
to first of all thank uh president-elect chapel and and uh vice president jordanic for working on this i think i
do think it's it's important um but it sends messages in a in a variety
of different ways and i think it's very important that this commission at the very least acknowledge that we are cognizant of and attentive to
the very poisoned information atmosphere around the country right now um
about dominion software that's being used in a variety of ways by a variety of players with a variety
of motives and that signals that we may be wanting to send to a company may
easily be captured by those we're not intending to single signal anything to
or perhaps we are i don't i don't think we are um but i we uh i personally find
it this a very difficult choice because um what we're all we're really able to
do here is is uh send a signal of displeasure um
i don't believe uh the commission i i believe the the
resolution as it stands backs the commission away from interfering with director arns's sole responsibility
however it does also uh override in some ways it
sends a signal that we still wanted to say this regardless of what the director told us about what he needs
um so we're sending a lot of signals i'm not sure we're accomplishing anything and i want to again reiterate that we
cannot be certain how signals get picked up and read and used or misused so the
question from me to you dca flores is does this um stand firmly on the side of the
non-interference line um between the commission and director horns's responsibilities
one second
uh so in terms of violating the non-interference clause
i don't believe that this resolution does so because it simply is a request to the
board of supervisors thank you
thank you i just wanted to uh weigh in just
briefly um to support what um
commissioner bernholtz had mentioned um which is part of why i felt kind of strongly when we talked about this
probably my first meeting about the rathensburger case and
removing that component and i do think that the
well dominion may not be considered by some members of the public or commission um
to be the ideal solution it is the system we're working with now and i agree that
there is a lot of misinformation and um
honestly malice intended misinformation surrounding the voting system and i agree that we
are dancing we're playing a fine line between
ensuring that we're maintaining the integrity of the system that we're currently using
and while striving to hold accountable so i think if i guess one question i have is
i think commissioner jardonic you had said that you felt that or sorry vice president jordanic you
perceived that this the the section needed to remain in the resolution because it put
closure in some capacity to the issue of the um
to the issue and so do you feel that
without incorporating that specific piece you i think you had expressed some desire to
do something else can you just elaborate on that a little bit
yeah so but before i answer that question i just want to make very clear that this
resolution is not it's not its goal is not to signal displeasure with dominion it's more
it's about acting in consistency with our open source policy and that's that's why the
the resolution leads with the open source so the the thing about
what the and there's nothing negative in here about dominion as a company
or about about their voting system the only thing that's negative in here is the thing that the dominion sales
representative said so i think it's kind of secondary to what this resolution is trying to
achieve which is all it is is just to renew the contract one year
but um i was thinking that the reason to include in the first place
because it i think it is relevant but um at the same time it's not necessary
but in terms of bringing closure and this wasn't just me but it was as a as a body i think a lot
of us over the past several months have said we needed to do something more
given that he did not respond to the letter that um president at the time bernholtz wrote to
him and um so i think it's not just me but i feel
like as a body or individuals on this body felt that we had some like on something more that
we had to do to um [Music] acknowledge or respond to the fact that
he did not um you know reply to our letter asking him for an explanation
thank you for clarifying
i mean if he didn't say it he should tell us that you know for example but i think the reason i asked um and i
agree i get from the from the revisions of the resolution i
do think that open source source voting is the primary um kind of
i think it's the primary rationale i think just the inclusion of this piece um
uh i agree that it is concerning and there that there
was no response though if if the primary focus is around
open source voting it seems kind of an arbitrary piece to include in the resolution and
perhaps would require might be beneficial to have a separate um it and i actually i don't have like
particularly strong feelings it's more just for the purposes of dialogue of whether this is the right
forum to um elevate that and that's why i had asked about alternatives
because the quote in the newspaper
that we don't have additional information on because it wasn't responded to
as a rationale for not extending a contract i just am not sure if that is
really as crucial as really the emphasis on the
open source voting okay if we did can i just ask if we did remove it and this is a question to
everyone if we did remove it would people want to revisit that at a future meeting
on on how to proceed with that yeah i think we've this has come up in a number of
meetings and we've kept deferring it and i think you know we've my sense of what the commission has felt
is that there should be some response but we haven't really figured out what to do i think in part because we
are so sensitive to the issue that uh commissioner bernholtz has raised that we don't want to send
a a message that could be misappropriated in some way
um as it relates to this resolution you know part of what we talked about
before part of why you know i got more comfortable with it was because we were really focusing on
preserving optionality to move to a system that was in line with our mission
statement more so than moving away from a system that we did not like or did not think
worked because in reality that is the system we're going to be using and we have used and we've approved those
elections and so i think to some extent having these two whereas
clauses muddies the water a little bit because it does talk about kind of dominion
on the other hand if your vendor disparages you in the real world that is very much a reason to reconsider
your relationship so i don't think that's not kind of relevant for the purposes of a contract extension
but you know i i think maybe given how much kind of
heartburn we're having up here about this it might make sense to take it out of this resolution and then again
consider how to revisit the uh the issue with the dominion rap just
because it doesn't seem like we're and i don't want to speak for anyone else but just kind of the reaction i'm seeing
here is that you know this is maybe muddying the waters a little bit of what the purpose of the resolution is
can i just add one additional thing um which is i agree that the disparaging of
the [Music] the relationship is a is a problem but it is one sales representative and it's
not to say it's not problematic but i don't think that that is
as i just i would almost encourage a a second
letter or a second statement that is kind of a supplement to the resolution
that the resolution is primarily focused on the technology and or the software and the
the rationale behind that and then a secondary piece that is expressed at least stating discontent
with the not only the sales representative's lack of response but the organizational
lack of response um and that that did not that was not um
that did not bode well in the decision making of the contract but it
wasn't a deciding factor because it isn't i i didn't my perception of the last several months
was that wasn't a deciding factor it's the open source voting that is and so to just have those be cleanly separated
might be beneficial but i'm i'm open it's just something for
discussion so i just
you know honestly i could go either way on this because i do think this is intended to be an affirmative
resolution restating the commission's policy in support of open source voting and making sure that we allow room for
that and not make decisions that are inconsistent with our stated policy
however if we pull this out it might make it a bigger deal
i mean then it might really seem like there's an anti-dominion piece here um
so that's what i struggle with because on the one hand just like making statements of fact in this
document in a whereas clause not in a resolve clause right
just to provide context it's like it seems
you know like as chris said we could let it lie um if we pull it out it i wonder if it
makes it a bigger deal than we want it to so and by pulling it out you mean pulling it out and making its own
separate things that's a stand alone yeah item that it it perhaps
raises it to a level that you know we don't want to raise it to that that's my only concern
but i do understand your point that it you know there's a lot of stuff in here right that's why we took some other
stuff out but uh it isn't irrelevant right
i mean if you're talking about a different system whether it be open source or another proprietary system you kind of have to talk about the system
that you have so so and i think it's fairly it's factual
statements i mean there was a newspaper article and
president bernoullis did write a letter that was not responded to so it's a statement of facts i feel like
if we made it a standalone thing it would just perhaps be like i said
make it a bigger deal
i don't know how do you feel commissioner you're not like having thought about this some more well
i mean like i said earlier i can go either way and i think [Music]
i support a lot of the comments that everyone has been making so i would kind of defer to [Music]
um commissioner bernholtz and commissioner shapiro like what what would you like to
do on this i think i i think that's it's kind of
yeah that's kind of the point like if we remove it then do people do we really want to revisit
it at a future meeting and then um
yeah is that going to make it a bigger thing but um
i mean i can go either way i just i would like to see hear what
i commissioner bernholtz i i from my memory of your letter um which to be
fair i read months ago um we already expressly stated and i think
all of you would recall that it was inappropriate and disrespectful um and so
that would just be repeating something that was already included it seems like the only new
piece that we would be stating is that there was no response from dominion is that correct
that has been noted in prior minutes or it should have been
because i i i can go about i can go both ways but i'm curious if you have any shift in
your perspective after this conversation
i yeah i don't i i i'd like everyone else find this to be a lot of um
a lot of very uh important attention um to a document that i'm
not sure um kenner will bear the weight we're putting on it um
but i don't think i think i agree with uh i do agree with
commissioner jerdone's first comment that um keeping it in here um attends to it
i don't know if it puts that particular issue to bed but it attends to it and um i think the document actually does a
good job of framing this as being about open source okay and and that that's our that's our
uh that's the horizon we're aiming for so i i would lean toward leaving it in
let's leave it in okay i think then we're ready to take a vote
okay secretary delgadillo okay
um president chapel how do you vote yes commissioner bernhards
yes commissioner dye aye vice president
jordanic yes and commissioner shapiro yes okay with five in the affirmative
passes okay great thank you everyone
7. Redistricting Process Initiative
moving on item number seven redistricting process initiative
discussion and possible action regarding the commission's potential recommendations with respect to the san
francisco redistricting process including historical background in the proposed project plan
um for the purposes of this agenda item we're elevating stephen hill and julia
marks to panelists who are both in person
um so they'll not be restricted by the public comment uh time
constraints uh i'm going to pass it over to commissioner shapiro and
commissioner dai who are kind of spearheading this part of the process i'll let you give introduction and kind
of introduce your yes sure um
so uh after i put this item on the agenda for our last meeting the
commission directed uh me and commissioner shapiro to
hatch a plan on how we might have this public forum and discussion on how to
improve san francisco's redistricting process so we subsequently put our heads
together and commissioner shapiro kindly wrote up our
notes here uh which is posted in the packet as the first item
which we're calling the uh redistricting initiative um and what we wanted to do is uh
hopefully agree on objectives and and deliverables
uh and we we have proposed a general approach that uh
uh we didn't want to
put too many uh boundaries on this um but we did uh kind of organize the the
different aspects of the redistricting process into kind of categories uh and then we left open
at the bottom of this document you'll see um
discussion about what the timeline should actually be if there are speakers the commission would like to hear from
any thoughts on public outreach and engagement and what a final delivery may or may not look like and i will say that
we don't have to decide on that right now there's also
some deadlines coming up that may push the deadline in terms of
valid initiatives that might go on the november ballot so there may be external events that may
push us one way or the other um commissioner shapiro do you want to run
through this really quickly and then we can invite our our guests to speak and address the
commission sure the comprehensive yes or just the approach
um go through the document however you feel would be most helpful sure um
[Music] really the goal the kind of overview of this is just to
follow up on the attention that was brought to the regis searching process
earlier this year and offer a public forum for education dialogue and strategic recommendations
from various stakeholders but predominantly the public and independent
advocacy groups um and we really wanted to
lay out a clear objective where we can look at the current process and explore
the alternatives to um procedures from the comprehensive
holistic uh process from pic qualifying uh candidates from outreach uh for the task
force to their actual processes their when they are what kind of trainings they are required
to do to the actual mapping and drafting process and community feedback
um and then potentially depending on where we land from all of
the feedback um informing a memorandum or as commissioner dai mentioned a
charter amendment um initially we had discussed that this
initiative may be a six-month process though depending on many
considerations it could extend longer and it is a joint undertaking by all
members of the elections commission although commissioner dye has extensive experience in redistricting
and i did support the general approach and initiative plan
this will be a joint initiative amongst all members and we encourage the public
to participate in the process um we may also call special meetings um as
needed um as we may need to spend additional time to have a discussion
specifically related to subject matter around redistricting
as i mentioned we're going to allow space to examine the holistic redistricting process
and thinking about this in kind of five buckets um first looking at the task
force member composition and commissioner dye put together a really
helpful uh review of best practices
um kind of a high level understanding of what san francisco redistricting process looks like and then
um what other independent commissions um or task forces
processes are and how they differ and so um i that kind of informed some
of these um these buckets though please know this is not set in stone so ty sorry
type is an independent body of citizens um or um open to other discussion the structure
of the task force so um the size uh currently we're at nine um perhaps it
would be larger depending on the need um and also the process of alternates um
which became a topic of conversation over the last process when we were asked
to uh consider the the circumstances with our own appointees and what would happen should
anything change with our appointees what that process should be to ensure it's free and fair
how candidates for the task force are recruited the timing the channels candidate pool
and ensuring that is broad and inclusive but also that they are well represented
so qualifications for task force members um ensuring that
our communities who are most marginalized are incorporated in the process and included from an equity
perspective and then also the selection criteria and vetting conditions so really trying to
minimize any sort of political influence or special interest influence
and then onboarding is really just what is the process once task force members have been selected um how are they
preparing what is the staffing and support the tactical planning how is that developed consistent to
best practices and not just the kind of discretion of whomever is on the task
force um and then criteria this is a big may may require a big
component of the cross the initiative even though it's the smallest bullet on
the approach and that is because um there is a very
thin there are very thin requirements as it pertains to not thin but um
let's say light outline of the criteria required for redistricting and
trying to evaluate what is the best approach um and what criteria we should be using to
determine or excuse me how task force should determine what a draft map and boundary outlines should should be
and then the operation so once the the the process of redistricting is
going into effect um what is that public outreach process
who who are they reaching out to what is the procedural mapping process what is the voting process and how is
um how are all of those components documented and then accountability and
transparency which was a big issue in this most recent
process is the public input and the decision-making processes
uh the communications between commission commissioners
and other political members um and then also looking at
member replacement and recourse if there's for example a deadline that's broken or um there is some sort of
misconduct um these are kind of the key elements of accountability and transparency that we
proposed are talking points um for the commission to
consider as we think about improving the integrity and fairness of the
redistricting process commissioner die did i miss anything no
i think that was very complete i wanted to invite other commissioners
to ask questions or if there are any thoughts on this proposal before we
ask some of our invited guests to give us some historical contacts uh commissioner bernholtz
yeah thank you and i want to thank both commissioners diane shapiro for your work on this i do have at this point um
i mean i'll have several questions um but i do have
one question about scope uh that goes actually to the use of the word holistic which appears several times in the
document um although i'm not always sure correctly um
i think it's important if we proceed in any direction like this
to put boundaries about this and i would argue that um given that it
is a question that san francisco voters like to revisit
um which is whether or not we should have districts at all um that
we uh bound this in such a way that it is focused on redistricting
in a system that has district supervisor supervisors and that we actually um
don't open ourselves up to every possible question that could be brought before a group
like this so i'm not sure if that's um i i'm confused by the frequent use of
the word holistic in here and so i should ask both the commissioners diane shapiro if if you meant to open it
beyond beyond that um if it's not clearly stated
um there are eager members of the public uh members of the folk quite eager to to
reopen that decision which i think is beyond the purview of what you've described here
yeah so i think that uh when we were talking about holistic i think we meant
that although we kind of bucketed this out into five different categories that they can't be
considered in isolation for example you know the size of the commission
impacts the voting requirements um you know and the selection process uh
informs how you might remove or replace the commissioner so even though those are in separate buckets that
uh at we kind of broke it down so we could um you know kind of do a deep dive on these
uh in a in a logical way but at the end we'll have to you know put it back together again so to speak
in a holistic framework that might be a series of recommendations that would
form a charter amendment so i think that that was the primary
reason for holistic uh as opposed to completely opening up
the question of whether we should have districts or not would you agree commissioner schempero yeah i just
wanted to jump in and i really appreciate that perspective um commissioner bernholtz i think being
able to clarify what that means um and that it isn't it that it is within the
confines of us of having supervisors um
the system of supervisoral districts um i think that's an important piece that we can absolutely specify
um in the context of the use of the word holistic it was um repeatedly used for
uh the purposes of demonstrating that this isn't just simply the
actual process of drafting maps um but really includes everything that
happens before the task force even begins its work um and what if it
doesn't complete its work and so it's kind of the pre during and after process
of redistricting but not questioning whether redistricting should happen at all so i think that should be
incorporated and i appreciate that feedback great thank you very much um
the other question i have and i don't know this could wait um but i'm
assuming that the members of the commission are aware that the sunshine ordnance uh task force
held a special meeting on monday with members of the redistricting task force i'm not aware of any outcomes of that
meeting or what happened i um was late to finding out about it um
and i would just be curious if anyone here participated or has any sense of what happened at that meeting i believe
it was on monday going to speak to that i believe
just in time thank you director orange oh yeah well i didn't attend either
commissioner bernhard but uh the task force was trying to determine who the record keeper was
especially for the emails related to or associated with the task force members and my understanding was that the clerk
of the board's office was designated as the record keeper uh however the department of elections
is the department that's up the email account with the department of technology
and the concern is that when an email account is is cancelled there's a 30-day clock that starts
ticking and once like once three days um hits then the account essentially wiped clean
and so the department since we had received some
records requests prior to this this is task force meeting uh this week or last week whenever it
was uh we had already saved all the emails onto our server so and we also put a litigation hold on the account so
there's no danger of the uh of the information being deleted or
not available and it doesn't matter if dt were somehow to to move forward
uh in this the litigation hold and somehow you know uh let the account
expire so that's sort of a summary of the situation super that's very helpful i would also
just then note that um i suppose
that's captured in this outline under number 5c intracommissioned communications and political
communication but since it's a lived experience problem we would want to make sure any
future review process addressed some of those issues like
um staffing and technology and responsibility and things like that that's a good point i agree
i'm finished thank you okay i have a um a couple
a few comments but i just wanted to begin by thanking both of you for your good work on this it's
it's obvious that you've spent a lot of time you know thinking about this and it seems very comprehensive
in terms of what's what can be covered um so i have two very minor things i just
wanted to add to the list and then kind of a larger comment that is similar to the comment that commissioner bernholtz
made um just there are two things i don't i don't think we're specifically called
out but one is um like who should appoint the members you know as distinct from the
composition so maybe that section could be phrased something like composition and
selection maybe and then the second thing was like independent of the onboarding and
when the map making process should begin maybe have a something about the overall timeline
and in particular how early can the members be appointed
relative to like when the maps or the census data is finalized you know can they start potentially
earlier just to give more time for the whole process it's kind of kind of more of a legal
let me ask for clarification on that um so when you say the overall timeline and
how quickly like the mapping process can begin once commit task force members have been
selected are you referring to something different from to be
the tactical planning of the timeline just are you suggesting
that we provide strategic recommendations about how quickly members should or members should be
selected can you just clarify what specific part of that so i was i was saying timeline like separate from
the timeline once the task force is appointed so like even earlier like how because i
think right now it's kick-started when the census date is finalized but like are there are we would you be legally
allowed to start picking members even before that just to kind of get things rolling yeah i mean and
i believe also this year because the census data came out so late that process did start earlier did it
not i'm not sure um yeah we actually census data was
released yeah yeah we the elections commission actually uh if i recall appointed our
appointees first and then actually tried to move the board and mayor along
be knowing that the data would come out and the
task force would have to start map making the idea was to try to
point the body to do some of this pre-work before that it was not a successful effort but i
think uh commissioner gerdonic's recommendation is right on point again from recent experience
so just to not to harp on this but so i understand correctly
basically best practices on how quickly the the kickstart the whole thing
yep yeah just to clarify what i was saying the um the when
the mayor the board of supervisors and the elections commission can appoint as
prior to census data one additional thing i wanted to get into that is also
exploring alternatives if say one of the appointing bodies does not
meet that best practice um is there a suggest do we want to also incorporate a
suggestion of um alternatives where if there aren't
specific deadlines that are met by those appointing bodies then the elections commission would step in to appoint the
others because it sounded like the process had that had slowed the process down in some
capacity so i guess just making sure that i understood your comment so i can incorporate the feedback and then adding
that additional point yeah yeah and then the last comment was related to what commissioner bernhard
says and it's kind of related to the holistic word but um
so and also there's a sentence in there about how the purpose of redistricting
is to ensure fair supervisorial representation so one of the
one of the um sort of like
i'm not sure if problems is the right word but one of the issues that comes up in these types of conversations is
people um might not be aware that there are
alternatives to single member districts that can provide better representation
for voters that it's sort of like an inherent limitation of only having
one person represent a district and it's not just the matter of
whether there's districts but even if you do have districts you could elect
multiple people from a district you know perhaps proportionally and um
so and i understand that there may be a desire to to limit the scope of the
conversation but i think if we do limit the scope of the conversation i think we should um it would be good to
acknowledge the limitations of single member districts and then state
you know maybe without making recommendations beyond it but just that there are these other approaches
although they won't be considered within the scope of this document so um
just so that we don't promote a perception that this is kind
of like the best that can be done with respect to representing the voters
if we do decide to to limit the scope in that way i have a question for commissioner
bernholtz because i think commissioner dirdonick is talking about a situation where there
still would be districts but they may not be single member districts or there may be fewer
districts and would you feel like that would be
um you know would it be worth having part of a session to just
educate the public and the commission on what some of these other alternatives look like
could i just add one and but just so you know commissioner bernholtz and also not just but also how they're elected like
whether they're elected proportionally you know or or versus
yeah from my you know my perspective on this is
for the elections commission to take on lessons learned and better practices
as an educational process for both ourselves as as the commission
and in our role vis-a-vis the public um
to do that within the confines of the existing laws about
supervisorial districts in the city and county is a massive undertaking
it's huge what you've outlined here it's critical it's important i don't know that there's anybody else
to do it and therefore i can be convinced that we should do it but it's an enormous task
to go anywhere beyond that i actually think gets beyond the realm
of the elections commission into real public policy making about the
democratic processes um and
we are a body in charge of uh oversight of the department not in charge of public
policy about democratic practice so um just to say nothing of the fact that i don't think we're resourced well
enough to do so so uh my own thinking about this is um
the smallest piece of work that i could the tightest boundaries i
could draw around this piece of work still leaves an enormous amount of work
uh so i'm i think it's um not something we could do well i don't
necessarily think it's in our purview to take on those bigger questions i agree with uh commissioner gerdonic that a
well-crafted memo that says we're not taking those on because they're beyond our
our resources and our scope is is sufficient because to not say it is
um to pretend that we have all agreed that this is the best but it's also um i
think it's important that you that boundaries be drawn on this or will never get anything else done
um right i appreciate that well stated
not sure we'll get this done but i know we'll never get anything else done well you know much better resourced
organizations have like not succeeded in debating this issue so um but i do think in the same way in the
document that uh that was shared um at the last meeting i i
acknowledged it you know in a sentence in the intro for the same reason because
because of exactly what you said we don't want to pretend that the system we have is the best but it is the system we have and and i do think it is squarely
within our purview to at least fix the system we have so um
i guess just a few points i think piggybacking off of commissioner bernholtz and
i wasn't here at the last meeting i absolutely agree that something should be done as a reaction to and in response
to the feedback we got from you know our meetings that involve the
redistricting task force i guess i have more questions at this point than answers i
i are we the right body to do this i don't necessarily think that we are i agree i
don't know who else would be that body but um we're not experts and i know one of
the goals is to educate ourselves more and i know commissioner dye you have a lot of anecdotal
uh experience and expertise but i think i think that is concerning to me i think
a number of these items i mean you know we reaffirmed our independence from the redistricting task
force i think a number of these items go a bit to decision making and values and those
things and so i get a little bit concerned whether we're kind of getting involved in the
substance of it more so than just the process um
again i don't necessarily think we are i guess i just have a question to see how this would all come
how this would materialize i think if i were looking at it just in a vacuum
we are involved with appointing the task force members so i think certainly it's
appropriate for us to give advice and guidance to future us on
how that works and i think that's kind of to some extent a few of your items in number one
um because that's something we we can control and we have direct experience in i think the question of oversight came
up quite a bit and that's one that we talked a little bit about in our meetings we never really resolved so i think that's something we should talk
about in how that you know oversight generally and how that looks for our appointees
specifically all of the other stuff i get a little bit more
i guess i'm just not certain that we're the right ones to tackle it um we did get a lot of feedback directly from
you know subject matter specialists and members of the public during our meeting so i think it's important that we
memorialize that i guess again the synthesis of all of this this exercise that we're building
out which as commissioner bernholtz has kind of said is is pretty massive
i just i'm i'm not sure it's for uh it's it's our job or appropriate for us to do it but i can be convinced certainly i
don't know who else there is um i think getting into super you know
the fact that the conversation already went to whether supervisor i'm not even going to say that word
correctly districts is appropriate is a that's a politicized issue in the city which is
certainly not our goal to wade into and is also just so massive and i don't think we can tackle all of democracy
with a little d so uh i guess more questions than any answers i'm just
i'm i guess a little bit skeptical of our ability or the appropriateness of this commission to tackle all of this
so i'll stop there sure but also thank you for your work i i know i saw a draft go back and forth i
know how much time and effort you put into this thank you um thank you president chapel
i really appreciate that feedback and all additionally the
component of oversight which was is just an ongoing ether of confusion um
and i i think it's fair to talk i think your
point about you know thinking about member composition and also the elements of you know our appointees
what they might be accountable for i think that all is fair one thing that i
that i don't think that had been included in some of that point that i do feel like
we should address as a commission is the amount of community input surrounding
the lack of of accountability transparency
and fairness um for um for communities and specifically
marginalized communities um that there was a concern about that being tainted in
some capacity but also what i've continued to say in many meetings and those meetings is
that i i am most concerned about
communities coming to our meetings and saying we're not being listened to
we're not being incorporated our communities are being split up and we're not being provided
clarity on why and i do feel that as an appointing body
it's our responsibility to it to really take that feedback to heart and
also open it up to those same communities to say to ask what they would want to see different
so that we can then kind of synthesize it and share it with the board of supervisors in a memorandum
to make the process more fair and so if we do narrow the scope which
i'm open to i just really want to make sure that the community
input and outreach and participation is something that is strengthened
so um to address some of your concerns directly
president chapel i i you know if you look at the three appointing
bodies we're the only non-partisan independent body
uh you know i think part of what i would want to explore
is whether the appointment process should go the way it currently goes um you know
i think if you look at best practices um you know the
[Music] board of supervisors in particular has a direct vested interest in the outcome and should they be part of the process
so i think that it's not obvious that there's anybody else who would look at it
and i the reason that i was inspired to take this on even though i had thought i'd left this behind me
um is that our mandate as the elections commission we were created to ensure
you know free fair and functional elections and if if if the maps are not fair
everything else that director arms does after that doesn't matter so so to me it's like goes fundamentally to
to why the elections commission exists the other thing i would say is
i don't think we need to decide at this moment what the outcome is
i think that this could we could decide we purely want to provide a public forum and really
educate ourselves and the public and you know
catalyze debate so that other people can go forth with a charter amendment
um i do think if there are other charter amendments that are proffered
whether it be from the board of supervisors or you know groups out there that put something on
the ballot i would think that we would want to comment on it
but in the absence of anything else we may decide to just like throw all this information out there and and see what
bubbles up and simply respond if if something comes up and i think we don't have to decide that now
like i said there may be external events that uh our dcas have promised to keep
us informed of if there's you know other charter amendments that are you know percolating out there
that we'll have some advanced notice and then we can decide whether we want to speed up our timeline or not
so um so i think that can be decided later and maybe after
we're a lot more you know all of us feel very smart on this topic um
and the other thing is i would be concerned precisely because of my point about the holistic nature of this
of like picking and choosing which one of these categories we look at because i i really don't think they can be looked
at in isolation um so
i do think we take it on we we should explore all of these things but like i said we don't have to
necessarily come up with a recommendation at the end the other common oversight i actually feel fairly
strongly on this and i actually feel like we did essentially decide this in that last
meeting by affirming the independence of the redistricting task force i don't believe the san francisco elections
commission has oversight over the reducing task force that in our current
charter we are simply an appointing body and we have an interest over our three appointees which is why we
had that special meeting um you know that is something that we could
discuss right the type independent you know body that that is you know item
number one a uh i don't imagine we would say it's a bad
idea but if you have an independent body you need to have some guardrails so that
you know you you'd want to feel comfortable that any group of whatever the number is of commissioners
that you would be comfortable with the selection process with the composition with whatever outreach was done to to
get those people on the commission and whatever protections there are for the public for
accountability transparency and removal of these commissioners that you would end up with a fair map at
the end of it so that's kind of what
uh my thinking was on on kind of looking at these different aspects and i think that commissioner
shapiro did a good job of bucketing all of the line items i had in my table in the last uh
for the last discussion document so i'm wondering if there are other
questions i i'm thinking that our first guest speaker will really help put this in historical
context and might raise more questions i just wanted to say one very small thing
which was in response to a small comment you made um pertaining to
if the representation of the supervisory supervisor
um are not fair then everything else doesn't matter and i want to be kind of careful with that type of thing because
um i believe any exercising in the democratic process is important and critical and i
know you didn't mean it that way but i just think that was something i really felt strongly about supporting that there's
so much to the democratic process and um obviously we want fair maps
but respectfully having just wanting to respect the process of
our electorate and voters and our election administration so well said
Invited Speaker: Steven Hill
are there any other questions before we ask our first of our speakers to
help us understand with that mr stephen hill if you would
grace us at the podium here his bio has been posted
so i'm not going to go through the his very impressive background but say i will note that he has been a past
advisor to this body and we are very lucky to have someone with his expertise who happens to also
be a san francisco resident so please regale us with the history of
redistricting in san francisco great thank you can you hear me all right um well it's good to be back before this
body and good to see director arts again um and congratulations on another election nothing
no ballot boxes floating in the bay nothing of this nature so we all remember those days or some of us do
anyway um so um it's uh it's my pleasure to tell you a
little bit about uh my involvement has been in in what i call multi-other everything
cities trying to get representation in multi-everything cities for the past 25 years and every city is different uh you
have to find the the what works for your city what works for your demographics
and so that led me to be involved in um in 1994
there was a ballot measure called uh proposition l that was past creating an elections task
force very much similar to you but its uh purview was broader um it was came out
of a an a historical move to go back to district elections in san francisco and
so the i think that the assumption on the part of many people when that election task force was passed by the
voters was that it was going to be the step towards going towards district elections
and um the people who were appointed they were appointed by a diverse body just like
you are they were non-experts there were no experts on this task force at all it was pretty much like the tradition so
you've heard about perhaps about citizens assemblies and how citizen assemblies are assemblies of almost
randomly selected jury pools and you you bring them together and you give them the expertise and then they they bring
their values which are not supposed to be steeped in those of incumbents and partisanship to come up with the best
solutions so uh this elections task force met and lo and behold they ran
into pretty much the same thing you ran into in the redistricting this time around except this was 25 years ago and
that was it looked out you know when you start looking at where different communities live
and how you're going to draw districts for them um you discover that it's not so easy to do because i remember one conversation
people saying oh that will be the north beach um little italy district cinema said no
that would be the chinatown district and so you had different immediately different demographics who were always
already starting to make claims on this will be mine this will be yours and these sorts of things so as a result of
that the elections task force actually put on the ballot a second proposal um what's now called proportional ranked
choice voting because they wanted to give the voters a choice it was up to the voters to decide they didn't want
the incumbents decided they wanted to have the non the nonpartisanship of the elections task force and then the
the uh the the values of the of san francisco voters to decide what is best for them
um in the process of drafting these two initiatives this was proposition g proposition h
uh the elections task force was pretty insistent that the district lines would need to be in the ballot measure because
they realized that the district's lines are crucial so that process was turned over to
um professor rich de leon at the public rich research institute at san francisco
state university and i was an advisor to professor de leon as to the elections task force and
to different members of the task force and so you know they set about trying to draw
these lines and professor de leon drew drew a number of maps just like you went through recently
they were put out to the community feedback was was given and then the the the maps were
one of them was selected by the elections task force to go into the voter initiative proposition g
and my prime i like this joke that one of my primary contributions was i i was
one of two people that had to drive every line of the districts to make sure they weren't going into alleyways and
such things and we did find a few that were going um in the wrong direction so those had to be adjusted
um so proposition g wins um 56 percent of the vote i think it was
and it goes into effect it didn't go into effect until 2000 and um the uh
now part of the deliberations of the elections task force was about criteria and you know at the time uh you didn't
have things like social media and really powerful computers that everybody can get their hands on everyone a lot of
community groups drawing their own district lines so the um the criteria were uh of the advice of
the city attorney were left fairly vague there was no order of prioritization so you had
criteria like communities of interest compactness contiguity the usual ones you saw in redistricting at that time in
the mid 90s this was not anything radical really though it was a fewer cities did it than states and federal
government but it's it was allowed uh to to to have criteria but just not to
really have strong orders of priorities with it and it wasn't like it was necessarily legal just the city
attorneys being how they are they tend to be um conservative and they you know a number of things were put in there to
make sure that it would all hold up illegally so um you know when professor de leon drew the
district lines um some of the same conversations you saw this last time around in districts 10 and districts one
went on so you had district 10 which is you know bayview hunters point petro and
um you know whether that would be a majority uh minority black district it wouldn't it was population wasn't high
enough um linking it with the uh the uh progressive to liberal um
uh perspective in portrayal hill so you'd have the chance for a black influence district as it's called so it
would allow a black candidate to potentially win their um by making uh alliances with the
progressive to liberal white population in portrayal hill and in fact the first um supervisor from
their sophie maxwell from district 10 came from portrayal hill so she was able to create those
relationships that then for the last 20 years has given um ongoing black representation in district
10 even as the black population has dwindled and then in district one there was a big
discussion around whether c cliff should be part of um uh district two or district one
and you know contiguity versus compactus versus communities of interest and the decision was made and
generally i would say even though the criteria weren't ranked in any way generally communities of interest was
the criteria that was relied upon the most and so it was decided that c cliff was a
more of a community interest with the marina rather than with uh
the rest of district one and you know so we saw that conversation again renewing uh in this most recent
round so the district lines were set voters voted on it they went into place in 2000 first
elections occurred in 2000 um and um
so there wasn't any initial redistricting because the districts were already there um the
then in 2010 next opportunity for redistricting came around there hadn't been much population shift
and um you know by and large the daily on districts as they were called were
considered still fairly valid for san francisco in 2010
and there really wasn't much controversy around it it all was quite smooth even though there was a redistricting
task force set up but it all was fairly non-controversial i should also say also in uh as part of
the overview of san francisco elections in march 2002 is when we passed ranked
choice voting uh first election was in november of 2004
it was the first um passage of any kind of ranked ballot system
in the united states in many many decades and um and getting that already was a lot of
work as we know getting the voting equipment ready getting the vendor ready it was all new so everybody was trying to figure it out so um
we got that figured out and then and and you know things kept moving forward until
then we get to uh you know 2000 oh the other thing i wanted to mention was the elections task elections commission
itself that was established by proposition uh e in two in november 2001.
so in november 2001 there was a ballot measure put on for both the elections commission and to revamp the um the
ethics commission and this was part of a broader you know that was when we were having ballot boxes in the bay and these
sorts of things and there was a big push in san francisco that passed with 63 percent of the vote very strong vote in
favor of establishing this commission um in which different appointing authorities from different
branches of government would be able to have input into what would happen here
and it was also almost a unanimous vote of the board of supervisors to create the elections commission so this was
something that everyone viewed as something it's time had come to do this before that um
the uh the the the redistricting task force
as it was going to be reconstituted every 10 years would have been appointed by the director of elections which at
the time was actually called the registrar of voters um and so this was part of prop
g created said that if an elections commission is ever created uh
uh if if uh elections commissions ever created then then then the redistricting
would be handed over to that um the three appointees to the redistricting task force would be handed
over to the elections commission rather than to the directive election so it was all part of you know prop g in 1996 then
setting up the elections commission itself in 2001. so um
so then we flash forward to 2020 2021 and suddenly a much different situation
arises population shifts in san francisco um there is uh you know
much more controversy around redistricting as we just saw and it but for me it was very very
familiar because it was almost like the same conversations in 1996 over how to draw those original district lines in
the communities of interest versus contiguity versus compactness and you know i mean this is really the challenge
in any kind of uh single seat district system is that you know my representation uh my my win
is potentially your loss and and so the san francisco sort of ex
avoided this conversation for 20 years because the original lines were done in
a fairly uncontroversial way by professor rich de leon overseen by the elections task force and then 2010 was
non-controversial so now you know in 2021 suddenly you're experiencing
the controversy that pretty much every state every city that has districts experiences and and and
um you know there are options that you can do about prioritizing the criteria
perhaps there's lots of things you could start looking into but it doesn't change the fundamentals that
when you have 11 seats and you have 800 something thousand people in san francisco and you have various
uh constituency groups and minority groups and everybody defining themselves
a certain way in this multi-everything city you're going to find yourself um
you know up against a real challenge often so um
that i guess the uh the thing i would leave you with is i have a rule of thumb i like to call it
uh it's called i call it the golden rule of representation give unto others the representation you
would have them give unto you and i think pretty much san francisco violated that this past uh redistricting
and so if you have a think of that as a golden rule that guides you as you think about
how are you going to build into an inherently controversial process
something in which people try to respect each other and try to give representation to others that they
would like to have that might be um a good uh
you know rule of thumb and and i'll and just kind of as my for my own amusement i'll pass on to you
what professor rich de leon said in 1996 he said don't be stuck to the fly paper
of old ideas there's lots of ways to give better representation today
including better ways to do redistricting you can do things like randomly drawn
um commissioners on the redistricting task force uh there's lots of ways to do this
that that no one knew about in 1996 for the most part so be a little experimental be a little
bold and uh and push forward you might find that uh it becomes very energizing and exciting for the people in san
francisco who right now i think are feeling a little beat down by the process
thank you thank you thank you
questions questions
um i have a question so one of the questions that uh
raised by uh ah raised by uh president uh
uh chapel was you know who who
who should should do this look at how to improve the redistricting process should
it be the elections commission or is there another body that might do it
well um you know in in reading proposition e the the wording for it there's nothing
in there that does suggest that you shouldn't um but there's certainly nothing that says that it's your job
um and it's um i remember with the elections task force
they had to take on a lot of things and deal with a lot of things that they didn't really anticipate initially
um because it's just inherent in the process you know it's hard when you're writing this legislation i've written
legislation you try to cover unintended consequences but you know you it um you can't always do
that so you know you could leave it up to the board of supervisors but obviously there's
inherent problems with that you know you want to remove the self-interest from it
um i i mean there's really no other body in san francisco maybe there should be
in fact i'm writing an article right now about what's going on portland oregon um they're making a very big a charter
commission just has recommended some very big changes there and they actually have a in their charter it calls for
the um a charter commission to be established every 10 years so if san francisco had something like
that you could have a charter commission right after the redistricting uh task force
does its work possibly badly and um and so you'd have a a process
already built in that would allow this kind of discussion to continue
um so you know i i really i'm hard pressed to think i mean the off the mayor's office
has an office of of neighborhoods that could be a potential body but you know i
i remember in the past trying to get the officer uh the office of neighborhoods to do
um education around ranked choice voting right and you know we were advised not a good idea you know you don't want the
mayor's office doing that it's not considered objective fair nonpartisan kind of thing so
um if there's no other body set up i guess it depends on one's personality i say go for it but you know you have to
you have to really gauge that for yourselves i mean it doesn't have to be a lot of work uh i don't think it but it
is you know it is work and so and i remember the you know the election the elections commission uh when
reverend arnold townsend was on it um he he wanted to do more things like um education in the
community and uh you know he was uh one especially to do in the black community
um so there's been in the past of the elections commission i mean i've been coming to these meetings since the first
ones in 2002. in the past there have been you know uh
elections commissions that took on doing bigger
tasks that needed to be done but there wasn't any obvious body in san francisco to do it
and and so you know really it's whatever four out of seven votes decides or four out of five in
this case so well the ethics commission only has five
so everything you do there needs a lot of things need four votes out of five so
thank you any other questions before we go to our next speaker
um julia square yes and we have julia marks who is the
Invited Speaker: Julia Marks
voting rights program manager at uh asian law caucus and has addressed this
body before and her bio is also posted and she has a few comments to make
great thank you all so much um thank you for having me but mostly thank you for putting
time into this topic and hopefully for putting a fair amount more time into it over the next
six months or so it's very important that the elections commission looks into this as you know
it was a very difficult redistricting process and the public wants to know what can be done differently but
redistricting is incredibly complex thank you for putting together a list of
potential topics i think that itself is a testament to how hard this can be for
folks to wrap their head around and having a structured environment led by a
non-political body where these conversations can happen where experts can be brought in where
documentation can be collected and shared so people can understand all the factors that go into making a successful
redistricting body that's really important and so i really hope that you guys do vote to take the
time to continue to work on this and talk about it and give information and structure to the public for this
conversation it also is very much in the scope of your work um you guys are tasked with
overseeing elections here and as commissioner i mentioned elections fully depend on the system
underneath them including the maps and so it's important that you help lead this conversation
um i really appreciated mr hill's context on san francisco specifically but i'm
going to pivot us to a bigger picture and talk some about the history of local
redistricting in the state of california something that's very exciting is that there's redistricting happening in
different forms all over the state different types of commissions um with different authority different structure
different timelines and there's a lot for you guys to think about and learn from looking at that
landscape so i won't get into each of those pieces today i think that's something you guys
should plan for later but i wanted to kind of step back and show how those pieces fit together
across the state and how they've evolved so there's been a tremendous growth in the
number of california cities and counties using redistricting commissions over the last decade
it's really a laboratory here there's a lot to see historically local governments uh did
their own redistricting so the legislative body decided the maps and shows who their voters were
but now they're basically four types of redistricting bodies in california so
the um the legislative body so that's where the city council is doing it or the board of
supervisors the old rule but we also see advisory commissions where they're just
recommending maps we see hybrid commissions where they're selecting a couple maps and then the
legislative body decides and then we see independent commissions and again there's variety within
independent commissions the phrase is usually used to mean that the independent commission is the
one that chooses the map but the actual independence from the political process can go beyond that and
that's where a bunch of the items and your list of potential topics come into play so who's the appointing body
what are some of the guard rails around qualifications what are conflict of interest roles so there are kind of two
types of independents when we're thinking about commissions decision making authority and then the guard rails that try to protect the system
from political influence as well so sf uses an independent commission um
and it's actually one of the first big cities in california to do that it was san francisco and san diego back in the
90s and there's been a lot of growth since then and that's for a few reasons so
first there's the policy side folks don't want their elected officials to be choosing the electoral boundaries in
their city or county so that's part of the push second the state commission has been
well respected and was seen as pretty successful and so i think that got a lot
of advocates and communities to think oh we can have something similar to this at the local level
so the crc's first round was back in 2010 and so we've seen a lot of commissions since 2010 that actually
replicate a lot of the structures and components of the state commission so
cities that have similar structures include oakland sacramento berkeley and l.a
county as well so those look a fair amount like the state commission
um we've also seen an increase in the use of independent commissions in cities that have moved to district
systems because of litigation or potential litigation under the california voting rights act so those
acts are trying to improve representation for minority communities and usually in the package that comes
with the settlement there will be a move toward independent commissions because it's so important for the commission
structure to support communities of interest and diverse communities as as boundaries are redrawn
after the census and then we've also seen growth in
redistricting commissions in california recently because there have been some really important legal changes at the state
level so historically only charter cities were able to set up independent
commissions state law said that general lost cities and counties
had to do their own line drawing and have the final authority so a general
law city or county could have an advisory commission or have staff work on the mapping but at the end of the day
the politicians were the ones choosing their own lines charter cities due to california's
homeworld doctrine right are were always able to set up an independent commission if they wanted to so that's how san
francisco was able to do that um but it didn't really take off until the
last 15 years or so um but in 2016 there was a bill that
allowed counties and general lost cities to also do independent commissions it
also allowed advisory commissions though those are not seen as a best practice and often leave the public fairly
disappointed so with that line 2016
it suddenly became possible for any city or county to do this the 2016 legislation was also important
because it set out minimum conflict of interest rules for independent commissions
but it just applied to general lost cities and counties so that's just one of multiple examples where there's law
out there that applies in some parts of california that has not been included in san
francisco structure but is something you could look at you could look at that state statute which applies elsewhere in
the in other types of jurisdictions um and some of those conflict of interest
rules include prohibitions on the potential the commissioner or their
family members engaging in certain political activities leading up to their service as well as
prohibiting certain activities after their service um that legislation 2016 also set out
commission transparency requirements and public engagement requirements
and it prohibited the independent commissions from drawing districts for the purpose of favoring or
discriminating against a political party incumbent or political candidate
so those were really good government reforms but again didn't necessarily apply statewide just to the general lost
cities and counties that opted to create which not everyone did
independent commissions so [Music] after 2016
there was a continued increase in the number of jurisdictions that were using independent commissions
some of the ones in the bay area include berkeley oakland the city of santa clara
menlo park and martinez also the cities of sacramento san diego
santa barbara san diego and l.a counties use independent commissions as well so
there are a lot of comparators out there with different examples and advocates continue to push for
independent commissions particularly after this most recent redistricting cycle
san francisco's not alone in having some challenges and redistricting um and so
there are pushes in a few different counties where you know the public really felt that political considerations uh were playing a role
and that their communities weren't being kept together
and then oh just a note that due to the interest and appeal of independent commissions
there was actually a bill that passed in 2019 that would have uh required independent commissions in all counties
um but that was in all counties with more than 400 000 residents but that was vetoed so there's a little bit of a push
and pull in terms of how how many jurisdictions are actually making this shift
um and then an additional very significant reform came in 2019 and that's when the
fair maps act was passed uh so before that california law
regulating redistricting was very spare there was very little there
so there were um open optional criteria the only
mandatory criteria were population equality and compliance with the voting
rights act um and there were minimal criteria regarding public hearings there only had
to be one prior to the hearing at which a map was voted upon and so the fair maps act applies to
counties general lost cities and charter cities um and brought clear
ranked criteria to the line drawing process um perhaps i've mentioned this before but
the ranking can be really valuable because it sets respecting communities of interest
relatively high and puts that above things like having easily identifiable boundaries such as
the instinct perhaps to follow a highway which doesn't always serve community well
and also puts it above geographic compactness so that's now in the law that applies to redistricting all over
the state however charter cities if they set their own criteria um even if it's very
limited criteria like in san francisco are exempted from that provision so that's something you could also look at
um and then there are some other components of the fair maps act that apply
regardless of if it's a charter city um that are meant to help ensure it's really a transparent process and one
that truly includes the community um by having robust outreach and having folks
from underrepresented groups from language minority groups hear that the process is happening and understand how
they can get involved and give comment so the fair maps that kind of takes both a substantive and a
procedural approach in trying to get fairer outcomes and outcomes that are
more responsive to community preference and needs um
as i mentioned the fair maps act overall does apply to charter cities like san francisco but they're the criteria issue
and then there are a couple other components that um that the charter city can um
set its own rules for such as the procedure if a deadline is missed which in fact did become relevant this time
around so there's a little nuance there but i think that the range criteria is the biggest thing
um so as you hopefully embark on further
investigation of this i think it's really helpful to just kind of ground yourselves in
um why we're using independent commissions why san francisco would want to use its
independent commission um so i like to think of it in four pieces
increased participation by the public increased transparency
less a less political process and then finally more representative districts so as you're going through all
the all the pieces of things you might change or adjust in this process
how does it how does it serve those goals like how does it fit with the the true purpose of the commission
which is to have fair lines at the end of the day um and i appreciate that thought and care
went into creating the sf redistricting task force a couple decades ago but i think there
are a lot of lessons um and it's worth the time to to do additional inquiry
into other ways to handle this um as i mentioned one of those things could be looking at the criteria um also some of
you mentioned earlier some there are some structural pieces around the appointment process that you may want to
look at um the idea of randomized drawings came up that's a very popular approach in
other jurisdictions and is modeled on the state the state's approach um
and then the conflict of interest rules i mentioned but there's there's more that's just an initial list for you all
um and i i do want to say there are some pieces that kind of span uh structural
and operational and i hope you can look at those too for example the timeline mentioned the timeline issue you
mentioned some of that is set out in the charter and then some of that is in choices that are made by the commission
once they're seated and so it would be great if your inquiry could look at both pieces some of the legal changes that
could be made as well as best practices that you might want to consider putting into law or
otherwise document for folks uh seven to eight years from now who are
endeavoring on a new version of this so um
that's all i have for now but i hope that you bring additional speakers in to talk about these topics and share
information and look forward to this conversation thank you
Further Redistricting Discussion
questions i have just one question um actually i have a small clarifying
question and then a larger question um you said that the
requirement um was or the legislation had was vetoed as in vetoed by the
governor yes okay and then um for the fair maps
act the ranked criteria what um charter cities have
employed ranked criteria and what has been the impact
i cannot give you a comprehensive list but we should we can uh follow up and
then i will say like oakland just across the bay does
use rain criteria that are either identical to are extremely similar to the fair map section criteria yeah and
we've been in touch with organizations who've been active in redistricting in different parts of the state and folks
generally feel like the criteria are helpful because it it gives some grounding when there are competing
interests and it's hard for the public and the line drawers to figure out how to deal with that and you'll have
competing interests anyway so if like within a criterion right between
cois etc so if you can reduce some of that um by having a ranked criterion
it's helpful absolutely yeah so that was it thank you yeah
yeah i have a few um questions the first two are
um briefer ones so um you might not know this off the top of your head but or maybe you mentioned it how many
approximately how many jurisdictions are using an independent i don't know that yeah
i'm roughly i can answer that it's about 15. yeah is
it 15 maybe california yeah how many of those are general law i think
that i think very few yeah yeah okay and then
and then um for the 2016 law are the general law jurisdictions allowed to um
impose things on top of the base requirements yeah okay
and then the last question is um do you know like are there
are there different like good government best practices like independent of the laws that have
been passed that might speak to some of the things we've listed that you know of
uh you mean in the long the chart from commissioners diane shapiro or the list
of the list of topics that yeah were discussed today yeah there are best practices there's a great report um from
2017 that does include a survey of all the different commissions in california
it's authored by nicholas hydorne would also be a good speaker
and it hasn't i haven't seen an updated version since then but it does have
an analysis of the kind of basic components as well as recommendations about
best practices and citations for different parts of the charters and code for various
jurisdictions so you can see how they approached it is that from an organization or just a medicine individual he was affiliated with common
cause yeah all right thank you
not so much a question but i think that three kind of goals you outlined which were
great are kind of increasing transparency making it a less political process and you know increasing
representation uh through the district so i think that's good for us as kind of
guide posts and i guess i'm just interested over the this process
understanding kind of what especially the making it a less political process and
increasing representation kind of how that would look as far as actual kind of concrete things we can do i
think transparency makes is probably a little bit easier but i'm just i'm like i'm looking forward to
kind of hearing you know what this commission thinks and and what your kind of recommendations are on those points i know that's not
the purpose of this meeting but it stood out to me that those are good kind of guideposts for us to be thinking about
and she had a fourth one which oh you did be the fourth one increasing participation ah all right engagement
right perfect yeah um [Music] thank you so much are there other questions the other commissioners had
well i was wondering if i could actually ask one question from the previous speaker if
that yeah um yeah mr hill i was wondering if you
could describe how was the um the charter amendment that constructed the current task force who drafted that was
that an outside group or which which one the charter amendment that
created the um the task force the redistricting task force yeah um
it was proposition e was put on the ballot by the board of supervisors yeah and i was wondering if you could
just talk a little bit were you involved in that drafting at all or a little bit yeah do you know um like looking back do
you recall some of the like conversations they were having back then that might be specific to san
francisco or like certain things that you know some of these different knobs they were trying to turn
in terms of how to construct the task force that might help us
today in terms of um all right i'm getting confused you're talking about the redistricting task force not your commission so proposition
e was your commission reduced new task force was set up by proposition g in 1996. so the goal there was to have
uh uh diverse appointing authorities mayor board of supervisors and the
registrar voters each would have three so that would that that was not fair controversial
um to have that kind of structure was fairly common uh in places that were doing re
redistricting task forces like this to have different appointing authorities
so that i don't remember that being a whole lot of discussion uh except that
as i said they did put in there when an elections commission is created then
the registrar voters appointing authority would pass to the elections commission
okay but and then anything else about the structure of the redistricting task force that you can remember that might
have been no i mean at the time you know these things were not as common as they are now okay so um i think that
you know everyone knew that if san francisco was going to go back to
district elections it had district elections in the late 70s and it was gotten rid of as a result of the
assassination of mayor moscone and supervisor harvey milk
and that led to a huge effort to get rid of districts because it was blamed on electing dan
white kind of crazy logic but that's just what was going on at the time and so um
the they knew when they were trying to bring it back in the 90s that
you know it had to be some sort of pointing authority that created a separation of powers
uh you couldn't have one entity doing it but you know at the time they didn't really know about things like randomly
selected draws and um you know uh different ways of of even
trying to potentially elect uh elections task force or redistricting task force members i mean there's
there's different ways of doing it today that i think you know you you might think about and consult with groups like
uh like like hers that is that are doing these sorts of work um common cause also is still very involved
in this um and so you know i think it's worth
just doing a little bit of check to see is is the current structure of three because you know with the mayor doing
three the board of doing three you basically have six who are inherently probably going to be somewhat political
so it really makes your three appointments um you know extremely important and
from what i've heard you had like very few applicants um you know the city of l.a had like 700
applicants to its elect its redistricting task force and here i i think you have like what just 35 how
many 35 right 35. so you know and and were those uh with
those coming from a diverse group what kind of outreach did you use to get information out to different
organizations to let them know that you know how important this is and it just kind of crept up on people's my
sense um so they didn't really come to you with a lot of applicants so that's kind of outreach is certainly
important but you know even there is it does it makes sense to have the mayor having three and the board of
supervisors having three when um you know they're going to be inherently political and some people
believe that you can't remove the politics from redistricting so don't even try and i you know i don't personally
particularly agree with that um because we have so much more data now and things like citizens assemblies and and how you
actually can i mean the country of chile right now is going through a um a constitutional convention
in which they drafted hundreds of different uh delegates and um the the major parties there have you
know only a handful of delegates most of them are non-partisan independent delegates to over two-thirds of them
and it was because they put effort into how they selected those delegates and that they were picking hundreds of them
from all over the country i mean if you're only picking nine it seems like it you know you might be able to come up with a process that
um gets that even the the part the politics that you get from the mayor the board of
supervisors out of it and really has people who are going to come to it with the best of intentions instead of with
their um you know their own private agendas you know on cell phones with who knows who texting and calling to get their
orders that's what you want to avoid okay thank you okay
so um so i think uh uh julie you also mentioned miss marks that
uh you'd be coming out with another report is that right yes so um this year
advancing justice and common cause aclu and the league of women voters of
california are collaborating on a report looking at how local redistricting played out in california this past cycle
um it is more focused on the fair maps act than focused on independent
commissions but there should be some information that is relevant to you all so um we're hoping
that'll be out later this year so i hope it seems less
overwhelming there's a lot of data out there a lot of other jurisdictions that have
kind of leapfrogged san francisco because we were we were first
and we're kind of doing things the old way so
an example that i will give that mr hill mentioned is this idea of random
selection not having appointing authorities at all that was something that michigan
adopted they basically copied wholesale everything we did in california except the selection process because our
selection process in california is very very expensive and very very long
i think it results in highly qualified commissioners but it's very very expensive and very very long it also
favors more educated people uh and michigan decided
if it was good enough for greece it's good enough for for us and they did random selection uh you still have to
apply but they they literally sent out invitations to
a certain percentage of anyone with a driver's license was invited to apply
and very minimal kind of other qualifications some weighting of the
pool but otherwise random selection and at least in one cycle it seems to have
worked really well
one thing i just want to make sure that is incorporated regardless of
the process is and i've not said this a few times um but is inviting the communities who
came and spoke to us um in our initial first like in that special meeting that we've turned into
that very long meeting and then the second special meeting um i think it's really important that we
try and invite those specific communities to weigh in on a lot of that um and also just
not to nitpick but also the element of driver's license can also be somewhat oppressive um especially in a in a
city where homelessness is quite challenging in and of itself um many folks don't have
access to driver's license so we i think it's important to have whether it's that and not that we would adopt that
specific policy but i think being able to hear from those communities on whatever
we're discussing here um is something that we actively seek out
as a part of this initiative rather than it just being our small commission and
some wonderful subject matter experts i think the public inviting the public needs to be something we really invest
in so uh so what's before us is a
an initiative um that you know should we take this on and go for it as mr hill
suggested you know we
you know can tackle this we can along with the public learn about
what's going on in other jurisdictions and see you know what would be best for san
francisco um as someone who has done a ton of public speaking on independent
redistricting commissions all over the place i've seen many different variations and
you know one size does not fit all um you know california's process worked
really well for california and it was you know too fancy for michigan in some
ways right and other places don't have the same diversity we have here um there are things that are unique to
san francisco um that you know that came up in this last
redistricting cycle uh that that we could be very specific about for example the issue of splitting
cultural districts you know are there certain defined communities of interest
that you know would want to be called out for example so um
so i would be excited to embark on this um there are a ton of experts that we can hear from and learn
from so i don't think this is like a building from scratch at all i think we've had
decades of experience with this now um and our own experience in san francisco
and it's a matter of making it better yep thank you i guess
as far as kind of next steps my understanding is that we actually we
don't have any action to take in this meeting we probably won't for a while because we'll just
have it on the agenda and it'll be an item that we tackle with but i i mean
i don't think there is a i don't think we have to resolve to approve a plan i think i see
that as a living document that will kind of evolve over time and i i don't think we need to have a
resolution to continue with this work i think it'll just be an agenda item we continue to work on
unless i'm unless commissioners see that differently
if we're all in agreement that we want to take this on i'm sure commissioner shapiro and i can
kind of uh work on a plan for the next meeting and the next meeting and work on some
speakers um i would love to hear feedback if there are particular speakers you'd like to
hear from so that we can recruit them and have them lined up for us
can we also invite the our special guests to provide
recommendations on speakers that you would recommend i know as marks you had recommended someone but if there are
others that you recommend we include um obviously i've now said probably 10
times that i want to include the communities that came so if i think miss mark i don't know if you
have connection with those communities but being able to potentially chat with commissioner dye and myself about how to invite those
groups to come and participate in the process that would be great
yeah my own thought is that we would actually uh have some special hearings that when we get to a point where we might
have opinions and want to make recommendations that that we would invite
the public to a special session that where we just focus on this uh and take input
yeah i agree when we get to that point we might consider convening a beaufec meeting um
to if that is an especially long meeting
depending on how that's going to look and how many members of the public i think might make sense to do that as kind of a
special subcommission but our subcommittee but we can think about how that looks when we get to that
point i think your point's well taken of kind of what if what is the goal for the next
meeting and so and and i hope you know as we choose to continue moving forward
with this meeting to meeting hopefully there will be times when it's not all on on you commissioner dyan you commissioner
shapiro and we can kind of take turns or there will be pieces that can be moved forward by
other commissioners but i guess as far as the next meeting what do you see is kind of the goal how do we
we've kind of gotten the historical background thankfully from our our speakers today kind of what is the next
piece of the puzzle to start building out the direction that we go in um
i think it might be useful to
hear about a selection of other local commissions perhaps in the bay area
and what their structures look like just to to give us some ideas of what what these
other animals look like [Music] and i'm thinking common cause would be
the best organization to since they were behind a lot of this legislation uh to
maybe showcase that for us and just what did oakland do what did berkeley do you know what what did their independent
commissions look like and how are they structured and how are they if i could compare and contrast with san francisco
just uh so almost kind of like your chart using that a little yeah i think that's that's
a great kind of next step and then maybe we can then i'm just thinking out loud now and then
we could dig into the each of the chunks and kind of yeah after we have a couple
of examples to look at let's dig into the specifics of each one of those what do you think i again would like to
incorporate the communities to weigh in on what they find most important rather than us determining that based on just
another city i think it's important other cities so perhaps we can
[Music] also ask ms marks and any of the relationships
that she has with community leaders to just um support us in that outreach so that
they know that these conversations are even happening and can provide public comment because i don't think it should
be on just the commission to decide what is worthy of discussion and not it
should be that the public as well i've also informally i posted a public
comment to the redistricting task force and let them know that we are discussing this and
invited them to participate because having gone through the cycle themselves
you know in addition to their written report which i don't know if any of you read but um
multiple written reports from various of the registry task force members i think are interesting they they
had some recommendations themselves already and
perhaps you could include those as agenda items for next time as well that's a great idea in the packet at
least yeah the other thing that i think i would do just kind of to get us going
is there was a report in addition to the report that ms marx mentioned there was
a report um that was published by the uh the crc itself
which is probably less useful than the one that the league of women voters
commissioned to kind of assess the inaugural crc
so that might be we can put some of these packet items together for background reading and we will try to
get it up early uh since some of them are a bit long just because there are assessment
reports that that were done i don't know if michigan has done a similar assessment report but i
can find out so that might just kind of get us rolling
yeah no i i think i'm starting to kind of think about how other options look like and and
people's experiences with those is a good next step in a logical next step
all right okay um so
i think what that means is uh when we get to item 10 on the agenda we'll be talking
about this being the on the next agenda and kind of we we have an understanding
of where it's going so unless there's any other comments um from the commission i think we're going
to go to public comment okay so we do have more follower on the line okay
mr pal paul you're on muted uh it's david pillpal i had to move to
the phone i had to reboot the computer because the mouse froze so i can't actually get to my uh notes right this
second perhaps i can get back in in a second i do recall um
what what can i recall i'm sorry i'm getting a little uh loopier than usual hard to tell um
i did serve on the redistricting task force 10 years ago in the city as an appointee of this commission and had
that uh experience which i've talked about a little bit before and i'd be happy to present at greater length with
a little more more coherent uh thought uh at a future meeting uh i also uh
participated extensively with uh this past um redistricting task force which i
agree um was sort of less than in terms of
usefulness uh from my uh perspective despite all the good intentions and lots of effort uh that went on uh seen and
unseen uh i appreciate the two speakers uh tonight and i um and their uh
perspectives um which really did uh help put this uh in context um i also appreciate the
work that uh commissioners dai and um shapiro put into uh their work here i
to share the concern that um uh president can i just
call her president chap well at this point um uh shared about uh i i don't
know that it was discussed as a scope creep but that the scope be
you know carefully structured um so that you're not taking on everything and not
assuming a greater role than this uh commission has i do recall
from my notes that uh this would require a charter amendment to change um the the
big structural pieces and it might be useful if someone determined if there was uh some interest at the board of
supervisors to carry a charter amendment in the future to effect
whatever changes the commission might be mulling over if nobody's interested in
the topic then this might not be a good use of the commission's limited
time but speaking of which the commission has a secretary with limited hours and
although this would require a fair amount of time by the commissioners it would also
require some amount of commission secretary's time so just about
all of those things and ignoring the call wait um i i can uh i can come back uh in a
moment if i can be more coherent i'm sorry oh let me see if i can get my notes to open up um why don't i prefer
to see if there are other members of the public to talk thanks for listening and we just ran out
of time how's that for timing thanks thank you thank you mr popo
okay would you have one other color on the line you are unmuted let's
say um thank you um hi does this jen say with the legal and voters of san
francisco i just want to call to thank you um to thank the elections commission uh stephen hill and julia march you're
giving such a great presentation for having such a really thoughtful discussion about this process um i think as mentioned before by lauren
from a previous meeting that you know we'll continue to our um monitor process in the meeting and um
and you know just apologize that we weren't able to give input at um this meeting due to our busy schedules
then to thank you to uh commissioner guy for reaching out to us um one thing i want to bring up is that i
think something i was brought up earlier i think um commissioner bernholtz asked about the sunshine ordnance task force
and um them discussing the redistricting task force um at the previous meeting it
was actually cancelled so they because um the agenda
had a wrong webex link so they chose to actually cancel the meeting um that right then and there and
they decided so so they haven't actually discussed anything around this at the previous meeting and we'll discuss it at
the next meeting um other than that um i really do um like the suggestion about reaching out
to common cause california i think for the uh fertilizers have
we definitely reach out to them a lot around you know asking them different examples of other jurisdictions i
definitely asked them a lot about how la and san diego both the city and the commission and the
sorry the county uh redistricting commissions and how they operated and i think those are really good guide posts
for how we gave public comments for um what how the san francisco redistricting
task force should move forward um anyways um thank you again and have a
good night thank you
martha are there any other colors no we don't have any other colors on the line i i see there's one hand up that was mr
joe fell and he was already able to comment all right um okay so
we are closing out item number seven we're moving on to item number eight the director's report
8. Director’s Report
discussion and possible action regarding the director's part uh director arts thank you for your patience
i'll get over to you okay thank you sir uh so i just add to the report i'm not
going to comment on anything in the report but uh so we're almost done with this election i'll probably i'll certify next
week the next steps are we'll do what's called the one percent manual tally that's where actually do a hand count of
of the number of ballots equals one percent of the for the polling place and and put by mail ballots it'll happen
tomorrow at our warehouse and pier 31. we're also beginning we will begin the process of redacting personal
information from the ballot images because we post about images on our website so people can actually see what
how votes were cast in san francisco so we have to redact the personally identifying information
and then we'll try to get that posted when i when i certify next week and uh
that's about it really if i could take any questions on my report or anything else i guess
uh i'll open it up any questions from the commissioners yeah for a couple
um so thank you for your report um on the curing i what percentage of
voters do are you able to usually reach for the curing for the vote by mail it
i have not actually have not i've not done any review of the percentage
but i i can't say it depends on the election like the the november 2020 election had a higher period rate than
did this past election uh but i'll have to go back and look i've i've never actually tried to
discern a percentage i mean curious like is it you know like just in terms of able to contact them is
it like 10 or 50 or so you can you can get back to us at the next meeting well we contact everybody so it's a matter if
we can't do everyone will receive a hard copy notice in the mail we will actually we'll be mail hard copy notes and most
of them i'm assuming we'll receive it then it's it's a matter if we have valid phone and email ad
phone number and email addresses because we'll send a hard copy then if we have a phone number we'll call an email address
we also send an email but everyone is notified okay okay then i guess yeah the percentage that
that they're able to cure and then on the my last question is um
there's like the budget proceedings are starting now and i guess you could tell us what happened at the meeting you're at but i
noticed there's it says that there are three positions that are vacant
and then it also said something about p c s p e x and t e x i was wondering
you could um like number one say what the three positions are in the number two what are those abbreviations
so the three vacant positions there's a deputy director position that's vacant and that's been used for what's called
attrition savings for the past three years we had been in the process of uh filling it
because we had to get go through a process with the mayor's office in dhr then the pandemic and that all just stalled so we have to come back to that
the second position is a uh 1842 it's a management assistant position
and that's that would be someone that would be working in the admin on procurement and budgeting and contracting and also
someone that would be involved in these kinds of special projects like voting system implementation or if we were to
move to the voting borders choice act for instance that position would be involved that sort of work another one
is a it's a programmer's position and i i want to say 10.62
but it's it was a programmer's position that became vacant just prior to the april election special election
and the pcs was permanent civil service tex is temporary exempt and pex is
permanent exempt okay okay and then yeah and then the budget hearing was there any report back on
that no today was the easy one because they were just like a general presentation overview of the budget and
any questions that the the supervisors had on on on the on the budget
itself and the positions was something that a lot of departments had questions on i received no questions at all on the
budget i did receive a question uh from uh supervisor chan
about uh if there's been any change in in process now that volvo's receiving about in the
mail and then president walton also asked me if there would be any if the current
budget or the proposed budget would cover the costs associated with the pilot program that would happen next
year so the two questions i had i see then what was your answer to that second
question so so yeah right based on the scope of the pilot program that's been that's gone through the board has been
approved uh the vendor's already indicated that it'll provide the the resources and
personnel without charge as there's no cost to the city for on that side that on the
department side just due to the scope of the of the current version of the program if
it were to change then my answer might change uh then we would just fold whatever costs that were associated with
the program into our current budget so okay great thank you very much
um i have a question about the election plan as well and just kind of the
process of counting um mostly because i personally was confused as a voter and assume there are other
voters who may have also been confused and also just the national
media that was focused on this election and so i wanted to understand
how the department is educating the public and the media about vote by mail differences and the
counting of ballots so for example you know the press release on the i
think the 10 uh eighth um said there were still a hundred thousand ballots that had
um that are likely to be counted and therefore i think only 127 20 some odd
um ballots had thus been counted from election day but when you looked at the top of the website it said a hundred
percent of precincts counted and so i'm curious with and and i know in um vice president
uh jardonic's questions pertaining to numbers of how people are voting now i
think is going to be really helpful but knowing that everyone's getting a ballot in the mail and many people are dropping
off their ballots there may be implications around
election results that the public should understand differently than in the past and so i wanted to understand
how your department is talking about this and repositioning
itself based on the different forms of voting
so the only change that really has happened is that we get more ballots on election day
that also since voters are all the voters are receiving ballots in the mail we we stop processing the day before
election day and we send out lists to the poll to the polling places indicating who's voted already
now that allows anyone who shows up to a polling place without their ballot that they can receive a regular ballot and put the tag later
but what that does is that stalls our process for a day so we don't issue a report on wednesday the day after
election day but other than that nothing else has changed as far as our process is concerned
and so when we issue press releases i indicate that there will be no no results report on the wednesday
i think also on our website there's the the we have a schedule of releasing results
so we indicate that there will be no results report on on wednesday but no we're not
so other than that that one change there's nothing different as far as the media and the public is concerned
so just so i understand so the ballots that are counted that first round would
incorporate the ballots that are simply that are people
simply cast on election day not necessarily incorporating all of the vote by mail ballots that
have either been sent in and or dropped off on election day
correct so the the first report every every election is the vote by mail ballots prior to election day
and we make that clear in all of our materials that that hasn't changed that's that's been consistent for a long
time but just as you said so then the the uh election day results that those are the
the polling place vote those are the the votes from the polling places and that hasn't changed either
as far as reporting is concerned so there's been no change the numbers are less they have been less
as far as in-person voting is concerned the last several elections since november 2020 but the process hasn't
changed until sorry so you said the first round of ballots that are counted are the vote by mails that are sent in
prior to the election right interesting um because
i actually had spoken with a just member of the public who asked me why their ballot hadn't yet been counted when they
voted ahead of election day so i was and i actually didn't know the answer um and so
i mean i don't know what their specific experience is so it's the first the first chunk is the vote by mail prior to
the election the second is just those who come in to cast a ballot on election day not necessarily their mail-in ballot
drop-offs so the third is those that come in by mail after election day in addition
to those who used vote by malik mail ballots that were dropped off on election day is that correct
right but the first report and is issued election night right the second report
is issued election night the second and third reports include the polling place votes
and then the subsequent the suspect reports the reports that we have immediately after election they include
the vote by mail bouts that were received but then after we get through the vote by mail ballots usually around the
weekend after election day they start to bring the provisional ballots into the account and provisional ballots are people went
to a polling place so so the polling place ballots come back into the count so they're not the
polling place votes is not done on election day yes because of the provisional ballots
but provisional ballots are only a small percentage they are now because of the the will but also not because how we change the
process if we had not changed our process to send the lift if we voted already we would still be receiving 20
000 provisionals potentially at a high turnout election but now we receive just a few thousand so
for example if we're looking at the end of day on wednesday
and you're thinking about these kind of three or three and a half four chunks of
phases that are really incorporated now in the process
what percentage of ballots are being counted
through that wednesday of the election day so meaning the election there is no there is no set number and it depends on
what we received and the number of cards yeah because if we get a five card ballot we count less
going into election day than we do with a one two three card ballot so there's no set percentage i think it would be
helpful and i know um vice president jordanic included some of this in the number in the percentages that will be
helpful for elections moving forward to understand when people are voting like
on the aggregate so that we can better explain because if you look at the way
that the media especially in the in california in san francisco and in the
in the national news looked at what happened in san francisco it was a complete in my perspective a
misunderstanding of actually what was happening in terms of the counting because there was a
there were large generalizations made that were not actually before many ballots had even been
counted and so i just want to make sure that we get a sense of that number so that we
can better educate the public on what that process looks like from a phased approach now that so many people
are using vote by mail ballots yeah and we do and i speak to the media throughout the entire election cycle
a lot of the media that's that's incorrectly reporting the percentage turnout the percentage spread for prop
age specifically i'd already spoken that day but they prefer to focus on not everything that i said and that's
very common yeah so i mean certainly we can do more i'm not against that but at the same time the media doesn't always
grab everything that you give them yeah absolutely and not just prop page prophecy i mean all the prepositions
that were on the ballot i think they're but prep h for sure was the one that cost that caught the most attention of
course um and that's great to hear i think it would just be helpful once we have those numbers um
that we will discuss to then maybe explore how to make it maybe you know as
me as a common voter looking at the website i found it confusing when it said 100 of precincts reported
that it didn't necessarily tell the full story unless you went to the press releases to see that still a hundred
thousand ballots were outstanding um and if you think about that that's like 45
percent of ballots ultimately because you had only counted at that point i think
129 000 um ballots so that's a pretty different story um so it's not necessarily in
a um a push it's more just something i want us
to continue to talk about so thank you speaking of the reporting
um so i think commissioner shapiro
makes a good point like uh for example i i checked my track my ballot
i haven't changed my behavior i now vote for use of vote by mail ballot and i
drop it off i dropped it off the day before the election and it looks like it was actually
counted on the ninth so two day kind of turnaround
um so if is that typical yeah so it just depends on the volume of
what we're receiving the ballots and when we would process the ballot so
but three would be typical then so you can say two to three i mean just given our typical ballot sizes and everything
this was a three-card ballot sometimes it's five what do you think is typical for
like if someone drops it off does it take n plus two and plus three
yeah usually within two days someone's going to get a no but again it's part of its volume and timing yeah uh but uh
three days would be probably a long time for us not to process the ballot and depends you know
where it was dropped off if you're up in a dropbox or i dropped it in a dropbox and one of the official drop boxes yeah
it depends so if we picked it it depends when you when it gets dropped off when we picked it up where we are in the
schedule processing if we're different depositing for election day when you know so we haven't had a chance to
process your value so just they're just the very there's a lot of variable a lot of factors but three days would be a
long time for us not to provide any sort of information so it's just saying you know as a voter information thing just
saying it may you know when once you drop it off the dropbox we pick it up but it may take us up to three days
to process it but it will be counted yeah but i was checking right i was checking like okay i saw that it was picked up now you know
i just like i'm very interested and of course um it's a lot more relevant now that i'm on this commission but i think
that kind of messaging just to let people know if you drop your you know ballot off in a dropbox
it may take two to three days to count but that's a good point yeah yeah right just so people have an idea of what to
expect because i think you know there was a lot of media reporting and that may be what commissioner shapiro was uh referring to
saying this is oh this is a really low turnout election it was exactly 28 or whatever but
it was inaccurate because just a lot of it hadn't been processed yet it's actually was a pretty high turnout for a
you know exam between election right so yeah but then when those articles
came out only yeah certainly 50 or a little bit more than fifty percent of ballots had even yeah they were
reporting really low turnout it was like 28 or something like that i thought wow that really is low and then
it wasn't low at the end by the time all the ballots got counted um
another question on the on the uh results page on the website there are districts where
they're obviously east bay you know uh contests is that just because of old numbering is like legacy
or why is it showing no because when the there's census blocks on angel island
and also on alameda island that are assigned to san francisco and we had a precinct in on hollywood
island the last 10 years but from the from the previous of redistributing statewide registering so
but all the uh drafts maps and shape files that we received
did not have that precinct in alameda island but then when when the final maps and shape files
were issued and the state drew the information into the statewide database
and the state wanted to vary and we we had we had not received the final because the state distributes the final
lines and shape files so we were using the draft information and we didn't know we thought that the statewide
registration commission had remedied us having a pulling a precinct
on alameda island which is on an uninhabited little chunk of albany island but not only did we did we retain that
little chunk of down the island we gained a census block on angel island but
everything that we received didn't the lines were actually around
that that chunk in angel island also on alameda island and the shape files also indicated the same
so we don't know we don't know we don't know what happened but now we have an extra empty
precinct that will never have a voter in it and we have but because the state
has to report all the districts and all the precincts in the districts and the system is hardwired to to report all
that information even though we have no registered voters in those precincts in those districts and we never will and
we'll never have any votes cast in those precincts we still have to include them in our reports and that's why you're
seeing that okay that's that's interesting so just
so i know that we drew when we drew the first crc drew the districts we
tried we were required to abide by city boundaries which are weird right and our include uninhabited
islands for example but i saw um districts reporting with
the zero zero zero for east bay contests for example
and that's what i didn't understand because i i wouldn't think that any of the san francisco districts would have
included any of the of the east bay right that's where that chunk of albany island comes from right okay it's one
block one census block in alameda island but angel island is part of san francisco right
uh i think it's marin everything everything else because that because the the census block is assigned to
districts that have vote have uh votes reported in marin marin county
so it's just that it's just literally like a few hun a few hundred yards probably of angel island and i don't i don't we
don't understand it but it and we thought it had been remedied so we didn't expect this we if we expected anything it would just be an extra
block on alameda island like the previous issue would continue but then we added angel island and so that was
our surprise so yeah that's that's why okay
um did have another question which uh is escaping me at the moment see if anyone
else has a question yeah i just want to ask a follow-up on
the the issue of like the percentage of ballots that are counted on election night because this is something that's
come up frequently like i think it happened in the mayor's race the special election it was very widely reported that the
turnout was so low and then like a couple weeks later it was like one of the highest turnouts
you know historically and then i'm wondering but on the results page it shows you
know x percentage of precincts reported and it kind of makes it look like you have 100 of the voters so i'm
wondering is there um is there any way that you could have like a percentage of
estimated percentage of ballots that have been counted like if you
can um sort of like estimate based on how many vocal male ballots have come in or at least
flagged to people that hey you know on the results page that even though it says 100 of precincts it
could only be 55 of the ballots you know so people don't have that perception yeah and the
summary page is that something that we can change because that's that's something that we can format but a lot
but the with other reports are hardwired from from the system we can't change those uh in the precincts again that's just
polling places it's not it's not anything it's not vote by mail ballots it's just the votes from the polling places you know we we really can on
election night we don't know how many votes are coming back to us until the next day so on election night we can't
indicate the percentage of votes still to be counted because we don't know ourselves
can you at least include a disclaimer that says once we know x percent you know if it says 100 percent of precincts
counted what does that actually mean that means like those who voted on election day at poll sites whereas let's
say 70 percent of folks of voters actually vote by mail at least
then people understand that if it says 100 of precincts counted that's just
potentially thirty percent of total ballots yeah we can certainly put more messaging
on our site yeah i mean ninety percent of people vote by mail maybe we don't know we don't have no we do know right it's like ninety
percent right it depends on the election with this election wasn't it like 90 percent i don't know the breakdown it
might have been higher than 90 percent yeah i think it was 90 plus percent so so i
think um just changing when you say precincts reported simply says just say
in person voting on election day you know in person voting on election
day and then it'll become really obvious the vote by mail you know
and you can say vote by mail typically is 80 plus percent of the vote yeah i would
i would hesitate to put percentage like that out there but we can we can certainly provide more explanation of
the process yeah we can look at that i think that would be helpful because i think that is no different than what happened in the
presidential election where you know it was like it seemed like the vote flipped it's like well no we're
just counting the stuff that's coming in by mail right now so you know you would think we would know this better because
uh you know we've we have a high percentage of vote by mail i mean it was two-thirds
before now it's according to this last section election over 90
that's a pretty significant change even for san francisco so
so that way people know to kind of discount the the first report and kind of adjust their
expectations accordingly right so i think it purely is messaging it's just you know putting it in context for
people i think that would be really helpful
uh okay uh unless there's any other questions from the commission i think public comment we
have one caller on the line whoops
caller i'm unmuting you and you have three minutes to comment
oh there you go sorry you have three minutes to comment sorry it's david pilfer on multiple
platforms um let's see three topics uh without getting voted off the island
interesting discussion about uh redistricting's effects that might be a thing to add to the uh chart uh and
those future discussions is having you know at least a day towards the end
for the department to do a technical check to be sure that the
lines intended can be precincted and that there aren't you know sort of those technical weirdnesses
about creating zero uh voter precinct anyway i'll let you uh sort that out for the chart um i just
wanted to talk uh briefly about the june and november elections i think in
addition to your discussion just now about reporting and clarification around that um the sort of
highly unreported thing is that of the currently 228 915 ballots cast times
three cards is nearly three-quarters of a million cards all of which were run and counted
in less than a week and i believe accurately and i think that's
pretty amazing that the director and his staff working two shifts over the
weekend preparing organizing you know there's a lot of stuff that happens here and yes we can
boil it down to the numbers but the fact is you know this department operates
with great uh efficiency transparency accountability all the
things that you want and rather than putting out you know a number that's
fast we put out a number that's right and we want to get it right and so letting everyone vote who's
eligible to vote and counting counting accurately all the votes that were
legally cast is sort of the hallmark of their free and what's the third functional um
elections and and that's what we do day in day out so that's pretty great and then as to november um i
just did a quick look on uh candidates it looks like um one contest for
supervisor uh there was only one candidate uh two of them look
fairly that's district two looks like district 4 and 6 are going to be you
know contested and 8 and 10 have a contest but might not be as
contentious so there's that and we'll see how the rest of it plays out for november but you know once again i think
the department is doing a great job and um i continue to be supportive
thanks for listening thank you mr pilpel coming in with seven
seconds left always calibrated correctly um all right
9. Commissioners’ Reports
moving on to item number nine commissioners reports
discussion and possible action on commissioners reports on topics not covered by another item on this agenda
uh any commissioner's reports commissioner donald yes so i have three quick things
to report um the first is i attach to the agenda packet a document that the
cyber security and infrastructure security agency sent out earlier this month about the um
the security vulnerabilities that a researcher found in in a version of that imagecast
x and this is something that director arns covered in his report but um
but that's also included here under the reports
um secondly i included a document that of some numbers that i thought could be
useful for the commission to have access to for future elections and directorates i don't know of the ones that i listed
how many of them are would be easily obtainable for the current election
but um if any of those are maybe it would be great to see those at
the next meeting otherwise maybe for the november meeting we could
have some of those and these would just be it doesn't have to be by precinct or anything just
globally you know how many ballots are sent by dropbox and so on um and then
lastly for this election i did something a little bit different i voted using the
bell marking device using the audio functionality and um
i really just got a good sense of how that works with the dominion's bell marking device
i also did it at the last election too and i'll have some comments on on that experience
at the next meeting when we discuss the election so that's all
i just wanted to add a number that i wanted to add onto your um
your list whichever the attachment whatever it's called which is just about what we were
talking before about the percent before and on election day vote by mail
and um in person if we can have that level of granularity that would be awesome
um i just wanted to tap that on too um vice president jordanix list sorry
it's getting late i'm a little tired
i do have a couple of things i wanted to add if no one has something to attack on to his comments as well
for this agenda item oh go ahead yeah um so
i know we didn't have the chance to talk about the racial equity reporting um that is
something that i would like us to discuss uh moving forward and i'd also like to
discuss as a commission are our own racial equity and inclusion
it's just just sorry is this a commissioner reporter is this something where another agenda item because i i think i
apologize yeah it is sorry future agenda no no problem it's late it's don't worry
um okay uh did we take public comment on commissioner reports
no i could
on commissioner reports no uh i don't think so i see i just see a hand up okay
okay caller you have three minutes to comment okay david built out and i do this
without a timer just very briefly on uh commissioner
geodonix one-pager on election numbers i think as you talked through that earlier some of that um information could be
incorporated in the daily um director's press releases
if it's as to sort of ongoing status if it's sort of the look back of
how many you know in total how many used emergency voting you know was it free or
was it you know 400 000 probably closer to three um but maybe
some of those that that lend themselves to uh and after a total after election
report um could either be incorporated in a subsequent director's report or you
could have some discussion another time about how you evaluate the effectiveness of
the election plan and whether you're getting the right information not enough
information different information ways to uh analyze it you know some people are interested in the iris reports
they don't do a whole lot for me but um anyway that may be a topic for a future
discussion is what uh numbers and narrative are most helpful for the
commission to evaluate whether the election plan after the fact
um led to a you know three f election um or not anyway that's just my thought at
this point i too am getting punchy so i will
great thank you mr popo okay um moving on to
10. Discussion and possible action regarding items for future agendas
are there anyone no other questions on the line great uh agenda item number 10 discussion and possible action regarding items for
future agendas i'm going to start because i have items that have been brought up
so we're going to add april 6 minutes that will be on their approval of those
um and we will get those posted with enough time for people to review um the annual
report for 2021 that was taken off of this agenda because we needed more time with it so that's going to go back on
for the next meeting um talking about vacancies for this
commission and potentially sending letters and what the content of those letters will be will be an agenda item
for a future meeting for the next meeting and then a
an item so typically traditionally the commission has taken a hiatus in the summer kind of skipping either july or
august meeting so i'm going to start by asking director arnst whether there's any sensitivities
on your end as far as timing whether there's a skipped meeting in july or august
would be the election plan so normally it's i think it's 68 right now
so that would be in september so that'll be cool
and then i'll just to the commission thoughts on taking a
uh skipping a month uh in the summer july or august i know we have a lot to accomplish but
thoughts on that is the question if we take both or either either
typically yeah sorry i'm just clarifying no no
um so i guess the question is you know we've kind of had relatively long meetings for the last i mean basically
since commissioner shapiro and i joined probably nothing to do with that's right um
you know by skipping a meeting that means we might have to be willing to do longer meetings to
to cover the items unless you feel like we don't have stuff to talk about if we're going to be putting redistricting
on the docket for the next few meetings that's going to be substantive so no
that's that will be substantive i think skipping one meeting in my mind doesn't mean we would double
up on the length in the meeting but um do you see it floor is my suggestion um
and humbly if you'd like to continue um the work on
um redistricting um that could also be taken up by a beaupac meeting right i agree
um and you can select or appoint new beaupac members since i think
most of them are gone now so we'll add that um
i don't i it has not happened in the past that skipping a meeting means we have a longer meeting and i think
redistricting we can handle in a couple different ways so if we are going to take a summer break preference for july
versus august for anyone on the commission the only preference i have is around the
future agenda item that i wanted to raise um which i do has think has a
little bit of timeliness though i don't i don't think there's gonna be that much
that changes so i would maybe lean more toward a july over august meetings having july okay
but but i also can go if everyone else cares about august i really don't care
commissioner bernholtz anything that's better for your schedule
uh not a strong preference but i would prefer to skip august
okay i'm hearing two votes for skipping august if we end up skipping one so
uh we'll keep that in mind and plan to have july
all right any other future agenda items that i've not
mentioned i feel very swayed
um yes um so i wanted to go back to my comment about racial equity which was
um miss uh mismentioned in a previous agenda item
um and there are a few key components of that that i want us to both revisit and explore the first being
the conversation around land acknowledgements um i'd love to
perhaps reach out to commissioner bernholtz to get a little bit more
insight into the previous conversations around that as i believe we talked about that a couple meetings
ago um and understand where that kind of ended um and then the second piece is
looking at um not only the racial equity report for
the elections department but also for our own commission in our potential
letter to the appointing authorities of our commission for the seats that are vacant
specifically the mayor's office and the school board though i know that seat's been vacant for quite a while um
i think we are i think we need to be
i think it's important to me that we as a commission consider our own
roles in whether or not we do represent the true public of san francisco and we did receive that feedback from
members of the public in multiple meetings um and so i'd like for us to just have a conversation around that
um and also talking about kind of the specific priorities around how we can
ensure that we're looking at policies from a racial equity lens as well
all right and into the agenda uh any other items yes so there is an item i mentioned at
the last meeting which was um having a topic about sole source contracts
and this is a there's a contract that the department signed last september
a little less than a year ago and um for a little bit less than two million
dollars and it's something that i don't think we really um
had a chance to discuss or i don't think it was listed in the budget or anything
like that so i just wanted to have an item on that contract and just
more generally about sole source contracts is there a timing sensitivity with that item
um well i guess not um i'm just trying to oh no
there's no time sensitivity no cool okay uh unless there's any other
items public comment sorry
i do we take public comment on this one i think so you do i oh i do see an
embrace wow
i'm still here david filter um so if you're making a list of things i would
um add to that review of the june election plan and at some point a
review of the november election plan which i'm sure has not yet been written
although maybe the director wrote it during the meeting tonight in his spare time um on
uh vice president chertonic's uh suggestion about sole source contracts uh perhaps the city attorney
could also give you some uh attention on the behested payments
legislation and how that now affects uh contracting in the city and with
departments you might want to incorporate that in the discussion and just finally i believe the commission
uh reviewed the director's performance uh in closed session a few months back i can't remember exactly when but i don't
recall that the commission secretary has been reviewed and i believe she's been
in office for more than a year and i think having an annual performance evaluation of your commission secretary
might be helpful for all concerned i'm not looking to get rid of anybody i just
think having a you know annual performance evaluation of your two appointees is
um a thing to do so those are my suggestions for the list thanks for listening
uh i don't think there's any other callers so it is 9 24 pm and this meeting is
adjourned thank you great job