May 18, 2022 Elections Commission Meeting

1. Call to Order & Roll Call
good evening everyone welcome to the may regular meeting of the san francisco elections commission today is wednesday
may 18 2022 and the time is now 605 pm
i'm going to read a few comments and instructions [Music] this meeting is being held in person at
city hall room 408 when dr felt speaking of this place
[Music]
members of the public may attend the meeting to observe by public comment at the physical meeting location listed
above or online instructions are provided below connect around the agenda in addition to
participating in real time
[Music]
further i'd like to ask commission staff member mark delgado who is acting as a moderator to explain some additional
containers thank you commissioner donek the minutes of this meeting will reflect that this
meeting is being held in person at city hall room 408 one
dr carlton b goodlett 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 in writing by
12 p.m on may 18 2022. to martha.delgadillo.sf.org.org
it will be shared with the commission after this meeting has concluded and will be included as part of the official
meeting file public 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 comment period are available
via phone call by calling four one five six five five zero zero zero one again
the phone number is four one five six five five zero zero zero one access code
is two four eight three six six zero six
again 2483-660-9866 followed by the pound sign and then
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public comment instructions are listed on on page five of the agenda thank you
commissioner jerdone
[Music]
um you're on so um
can you hear now okay okay i think it's just the mask and the microphone maybe is what was happening
okay so um with that i'll call the meeting to order i will repeat the time again and it's
now 6 10 p.m and would you please proceed with
item one the roll call sure and actually secretary delgado before you
call the wrong claw i'd like to know that commissioner jung has so i would like to thank him for his
2. General Public Comment
service and he has been serving he had been serving i think for about nine years
okay so uh president bernholds
i am so sorry i had to mute her okay um commissioner dye here
uh commissioner gerdonic commissioner shapiro
and with four commissioners and president we meet form
okay so one kind of procedural thing i was advised that because our commission president is not here today in person
that we need to um according to our bylaws elected president pro tem
and president bernhard's head ask that i chair today's meeting so i'm going to move that
we um elect mr president pro tem to church today's meeting
so um do we need to take a discussion um
vote yes and um commissioner bernhard's how do you vote
yes thank you okay so for the affirmative it passes
i can hear her the audio's coming out of my computer i don't know why i couldn't
i'll i'll turn it up but it doesn't make it okay there we go we can hear her and you can't hear the echo
from me can you hear her can you say something for us please
yes can you hear me can you hear me
i'm logged into webex
so we're we're gonna we're working through a couple of technical things right now
[Music] the is or or the speaker
it's only coming out of the computer i used
you're a bit muffled but i can hear you thank you
he's coming back
we are still um sorting through some technical issues
so can you hear me yes
testing one two three testing
so are we good now okay so let's move on to [Music]
item number two general public comment
so build a comment on any issue within the elections commission's general jurisdiction that is not covered by another item on this agenda any members
of the public
uh let me see i'm sorry i did
i think you want to mute your computer maybe is that the echo
so just a moment um we're just trying to address an echo in the audio
you have to mute your speakers
you
okay
are you sure you don't there's a few i want then that happens to here
thank you i know this thing now mm-hmm
again i still need to do
so we'll be getting to public comment shortly we're just working on this audio issue
guess
um
issues
just
do you have like an emergency number for them
[Music]
okay
can you hear me now yeah yes all right let me hang up the phone um i
think your issue was somewhere in control but i think we're good it's david pilpel um
a couple of technical issues i don't think i have any general public comment the technical issues uh i can
see uh president bernholds i can see secretary delgado you guys look great but i can't see what else is happening
in the room is there a camera for webex for the room so i know who my audience
is because i this is what
this is very frustrating because i don't know who i'm talking to other than you guys happy to talk to you anytime but i
don't know who else i'm talking to and that's no one else frustrating look it's it's showing up here i don't know
on the web
if there's a camera in the room could you upgrade the camera video to a panelist
that would i think do the trick
so i i did i did speak with the media person before the meeting started and he he told me that
that is not an option but
but there's no one else here all right i believe you i mean nice i
know you're listening okay uh let me just see if i had any other technical issues while i have a second
here um i think i have comments on item
four and uh possibly item 10 11 thereafter but otherwise i
think i'm good for the moment if you can hear me then this is working i'll shut up for the moment thanks
turn over speakers
it seems like i t should really have this down by now
three minutes thank you my name is brent turner um obviously we're all feeling the the horrible
frustration here of this webex application i don't know what's going on
but we certainly are better than this i'll move on to the comments and please
don't cut me off i've been waiting a couple meetings now to make comment but
it's been impossible to get through because of this webex uh fiasco and i
hate to be irritated by it but the public deserves to be involved in these meetings and uh
it's it's a disaster okay moving on i wanted to commend the the commission for
the great work toward the sb 360 pilot unfortunately it appears there was some
negative influencing going on from john arnst toward the secretary of state's
office and now the pilot is delayed this is tragic obviously is we've got a 2024
deadline where we're trying to upgrade the security for the voting systems not only locally but nationally
i'm sorry
i've been waiting three meetings to make a comment and haven't been able to get through can i just have my my three
minutes um without being um interrupted and then i won't have to stay on the line because
it's impossible to interact under these circumstances so if
if you're not going to let me speak can i please get my three minutes and i'll move on to another subject
if you're going if you're if you're going to have to be on our subject when the agenda item is presented and i promise
you you will be able to we're not going to make it to the agenda item because the system you're using doesn't work for the audio the webex
isn't working it's been three meetings now so this is three meetings where we
can't get it together and and i i think it's obvious to
this is not appropriate what you're telling me now that you're going to censor me because i i want my three
minutes okay during the item that you'd like to discuss is when three
minutes would be appropriate right now well this is what i wanted to say three meetings ago when we started having
these problems but nobody can get together with webex and fix this this problem so that the
the public is locked out from this conversation i i mean is this serious three times in
a row we're gonna suffer the same thing over and over and nobody preps for the meetings
you've got to be kidding me okay you okay what i wanted to say for the
last three meetings but i've been i've been uh obstructed from making comment due to the webex issue which i hope we
solve is what i what i was saying was we seem to have some negative influence going from john arch in the department
of elections toward the secretary of state's office and now our mr turner i'm sorry um
we're restricting to general public comment that's not that doesn't appear on the agenda and
you'll have an opportunity to speak to that during that video
the audio is it comes and goes though yeah so so i've been waiting now for three
meetings to make comment uh this relates back to three meetings ago where i haven't been able to get through
because of the system you're using so i think allowing three minutes to the public
especially this member of the public that's been the pioneer of this open source work we probably should just give
the three minutes can somebody give three minutes and just withstand it
[Music]
so are you keeping track of the time
all right so um mr turner we're gonna try one more time so um
you'll have three minutes to speak but it it cannot be on a topic that's covered
by an agenda but if you're should there be an exception because of the
i'm being advised by our attorney that there's no exception and i think okay
well let me just say off topic for anything else that i want to applaud the commission for the great work that we've
accomplished in the past 15 years um uh being led by
commissioner gerdonic for the most part and and i'm saddened that we don't be on
track right now we'll figure out sorry mr turner we're
gonna have to end the comment because this is we've told you a number of times it cannot be covered by an agenda item
so um can we figure out how to get the system working so that the public can be
involved moving forward yes so let's let's actually it's not it's not working
right now it's an embarrassment we're we're better than this it's as bad as the voting systems we're using somebody
went to lunch with webex same people that went to lunch with dominion
okay thank you for your comment are there any other members of the public no no no
okay so i'm commissioners i want to ask you should we should we pause the meeting to try to
work out this echo issue or because i i think this is not going well right now
we did have it dozens and dozens of people climb in for the last
here with us
room
would you be able to help us with it
and try to work this out with me i would really appreciate it
she's logged in twice
she's muted
foreign
can you hear me again yes okay it's david pillpill again i too
share the frustration somehow i was able to unmute myself i don't know why that you know there are gremlins in the
machine somehow um i would have to say i agree with uh
brent turner i'm happy to listen to him for three minutes on anything he'd like to okay
i'm sorry right right we're worried for technical difficulties
i i could only hear about half that because of the echo okay so
until you
um
i don't know it was your dad
[Music]
naked right now
what that's is
we're not even showing up
yeah but that's not it's not looped into webex though
hello so i just muted it so let's try
i did so can anybody hear me can you hear me yeah you can hear me all around
then we should be okay let's um
president bernholtz can you hear uh secretary delgado can you can you do a testing
yes yes i can hear you oh okay perfect we're there thank you
lucy can you see us no there's no camera there's no camera martha i only see you okay thank you i
didn't think so okay so for members of the public we have um
myself commissioner durdonic commissioner shapiro commissioner dye we have director arts in the room
we have deputy city attorney flores we have secretary secretary delgidio and we have one member of the public um
matt rowe from voting works and then president burnholtz is remote
so um let's resume the meeting so let's move on to item number
three discussion possible action resolution on continuation of remote elections commission meetings
can i have a motion
so the motion here would be to adopt the um the resolution the resolution
second okay any um we have public comment on this item
seeing none have two hands raised okay first caller
i'm muting you have three limits okay can you hear me now
yes yes great it's david pilfel again okay i have no issue with the ab361
findings i'm back on uh technical and and procedural uh issues as i was trying
to say i'm happy to hear from brent turner on anything he'd like to share whenever whatever the requirement in the
brown act and sunshine ordinances to hear from the public prior to or during discussion of the item if you want to
take his public comment prior to the item coming up that's fine you have that discretion in
my opinion i respectfully disagree with uh any legal advice if that's what you're being told further i would
say very strongly that those items that were posted on the website today like late
this afternoon like in the last hour or so i think should not be taken up and
there are several attachments that were recently posted i haven't had time i barely had time to download those let
alone digest them just to remind you to stay on the
the topic of the agenda item i just found that stuff i'm getting very frustrated here i would suggest that you
take either a brief recess or have a discussion between you acting chair uh
gerdonic and president bernholds and figure out what items have been properly
noticed and posted that you actually need to take action on tonight do those
and anything that you can defer i would suggest deferring because mr pilco please please stay on the topic of the
resolution for continuation remote meetings there's no other way to talk to you if i
were there i would be very unhappy right now i'm trying to contain myself and be measured in my
concern for public comment here thank you for listening until the next time
okay thank you
the other caller um you are unmuted you have three minutes to speak
yes it's brett turner again regarding um the the uh breakdown of the communication network here um i i would
say probably best maybe to adjourn this meeting if you can't get it together
that i think that's what should have happened on the previous meetings when the system doesn't work let's shut it
down try to get some help in there certainly we're san francisco we have the expertise to get somebody from webex
involved or something so we can conduct a proper meeting with public comment thank you
okay anyone else nope okay any commissioner discussion on the
motion seeing none secretary delgado okay uh president i'm sorry commissioner
bernholds how do you vote yes commissioner jordanic yes
commissioner uh dye yes and commissioner shapiro yes okay before the affirmative it passes okay
next item number four approval of minutes of previous meetings discussion possible action on the minutes of the
commission's january 19th 2022 regular meeting and february 14 2022 and april 6
2022 special meetings so we have
three draft minutes documents before us today
one of those documents the the february was posted um just a few hours ago so i
think it would be appropriate to um hold that one off in terms of voting today but we can definitely take
feedback on those if anyone has any but does anyone
have any comments on these documents or um i have a comment on the february one
okay um [Music] so an item number four
i just wanted to clarify um the question when i had asked director arms if the number of poll
workers have been reduced at any of the polling places it was given the mass implementation of
vote by mail so just to provide context of why i asked that question
and i think it's appropriate to put his response which i believe he said that it had been reduced from five to four on
average for polling place according to my notes
oh one more time this is commissioner dye
and um i just wanted to add additional clarification uh for item
number four when i had asked director arts if the number of poll workers had been reduced at any of the poll polling places it was
given the you know the the fact that vote by mail ballots were sent to every voter in san
francisco that was the context of the question and uh i believe director ernst who had
responded that it had gone from an average of five to an average of four have been reduced by one if i recall
for the february election yeah so we uh wanted to have our goal with that for
really like 3.5 right was the number that we were aiming for yeah we never did up so i'm just saying that it should
be recorded in minutes because right now it's just like a a general question about producing poll
workers and i just wanted to provide the context of the question
okay sounds good um any other comments in the
documents and then i also on the february minutes item six i think voting works is
one word item six
so camera they're trying to get the camera on the on the webex screen
yeah the view from the cameras on the screen behind us
okay all right hey thanks general
kissing yeah
okay we're taking up just pause in our discussion to talk with the media people just for people that are listening in
yeah we fixed that ourselves
yes
we actually bought up a new system
right
so there right
the room well the room it's not on broadcast right now right
that's what i'm saying you need to find a broadcast time broadcast
yeah right that would be your department you know so we have
it the broadcast time is available he looks
right yeah it doesn't necessarily have to be on the cable channels
um you would have to if there's other things that are
like synthetics
basically first now
yeah i mean we could we could discuss this outside of meetings so
yeah so for people that were are listening and there is just a discussion with the media people to see if there be a way to um
broadcast the video via webex and that's something that will be looked at
okay so on the um minutes documents um commissioner dye i think you could
maybe provide your feedback to martha directly outside um commissioner shapiro the the
minutes for the april meeting were posted yesterday so if if you don't feel comfortable
voting on those today we can just move whatever we want to move today
yes that would be great thank you so we're still discussing this item
[Music]
so i think the proposal is that we defer voting on the minutes for february and april given
the late posting and if we have um comments send them directly to secretary del cadillo so
they can be incorporated any comments
on january i know that's gone through a couple of reviews now
yeah so um are there any additional comments
especially with regard to the january minutes
do we have a motion to approve the january draft minutes so moved
second okay let's take public comments
can you hear me now
hello yes we can hear you thanks uh it's david pilfel so
um i i actually i'm sorry to say i think all three sets of minutes uh have issues
and i'll uh discuss them briefly in turn on the january uh set
um page three the confusion about
uh rescinding the vote due to not having taken public comment um is in there a
couple of times or three times um and in particular the paragraph
the longest paragraph there the second sentence motion to rescind the vote was taken without objection to
nominate commissioner chapel for vice president made by vice president zhang i'm sorry i'm
fairly good at this and i can't make any sense out of that sentence um i i think
that this that that set and that section in particular um on
uh item six uh needs to be rewritten i think there was something
else there on coming out of closed session but i can't remember that right this second that's january um
april on item 3 the lengthy general public comment simply says several
public members expressed their concerns sunshine ordnance section 67.16 requires
that the names of members of the public who spoke if they gave their names be included in the minutes this does not do
that those april minutes need to include the names of members of the public who spoke if they gave their name and the
february set was just posted this afternoon uh as revised i've not had a chance to
go through that um i would strongly encourage you to put off all three sets for uh another round and um in the
future to finally post them thanks for listening
okay anyone else
okay thank you mr pill pill all right um is there any further discussion
can i ask one clarifying question was the only concern the for the january
19th minutes pertaining to underneath the roll call vote on the motion the paragraph that
says motion to nominate president bernholtz for 2022 was that the only section of january minutes yeah i've
read through that and i think it makes clear sense okay
anyone else okay secretary delgado can you take the role call
vote on this
mr president bernhard how do you vote until january okay thank you and um
commissioner donick yes commissioner dye yes and commissioner shapiro yes okay
with four volts in the affirmative it passes okay and then the other two minutes documents you can provide your feedback
to martha directly okay next item number five review of the april 19 2022 special
general election discussion possible action regarding the april 19 2022 special general election
okay directorants would you like to provide any um comments on this item
[Music] uh overall the election went well there was mostly a vote by now election there
was very little turnout in person uh we were able to because of the processing of ballots
prior to election day we were able to also get everything processed really
by by friday following election day and then we certified i think was on thursday the following week
so uh as far as we were concerned it was a it was a clean election it wasn't uh
any abnormalities there was nothing really that was to report as far as uh the hindrance to voting
and i thought i thought things went well that's okay thank you directors
um commissioners does anyone have any questions or comments
on this item i do not nope i i have a few questions director ants
um on the incident report system can you tell us when does a like a phone
call show up on that document is it
what do you mean i understand well like if um if someone calls in from a precinct it
doesn't necessarily show up in that document right is it it depends if it's an incident or not if so someone calls to ask a question we
can answer the question but then we don't register those calls but if we have to actually respond and
move you know bring people or resources to respond to the issue then we start to track it with the report
okay and then my only other question is um so you provided a bunch of like
numbers like provisional ballot report and vote by mail report and so on
and there were a few other numbers that i thought would be interesting to know to see how understand how people are
voting but um i wanted to just run through some of them and ask you if these are things
that you have access to or not so like um [Music]
do you for example do you know the number of people that use the early voting centers
the voting center in city hall yeah yes okay i'm gonna call it our website too
oh it is okay and then what about the remote accessible will pay mill system
not necessarily we we people if someone is voted using that
system we don't necessarily know that um because we don't we don't always track
the remake of those ballots we can go back and recreate it if we had to um but we just passed lux for april we
didn't track uh the remaking of those ballots i don't have account for that and then if someone like logs on that we
don't we don't have access to that we don't know that information someone logs on to get a ballot
yeah i guess you would you'd have to be tracking when you're remaking the ballot right yeah and then what about um and then i asked
you about fax ballots and you you told me by email that was 127.
and then um i guess i guess those are the only oh
and also then the number of photos that use the belt marking device is that something that you'd have to similarly
yeah we didn't track that for april right okay are you going to be tracking any of those totals for the next
election uh we can you could okay i think that would be useful just to understand
better okay um yeah those are all the questions i had
does anyone else additional comments president burnholtz
okay let's take public comment on this item
caller you are about to be unmuted and you have three minutes to speak
yes hello commissioners thank you and sorry for uh getting a little flustered uh previous it's just been
again many meetings in a row without public comment being available uh simply so um you can imagine the frustration it
takes a lot for the public to make time for this stuff um okay uh i just wanted to make comment on
on a couple uh things that uh john arndt just said uh one specifically
when we talk about clean elections and we're talking about these particular systems that we're utilizing now just
for framing purposes it is very important at this crucial moment for our
country that we recognize the reality the harsh reality that unfortunately
mr arnst has no idea whether it was a clean election or not
because the system we're using is deficient to the point where nobody
knows if the results are accurate or not you can get sort of a window ballpark
kinda sorta idea of what's going on but because of the proprietary software
there is nobody that can speak with authority regarding the results so let's just be clear about that that's why
we're trying to move the systems to an upgraded security model so i just wanted to take a
exception i appreciate the fact we want to have public confidence and we do naturally refer to our elections in san
francisco as clean elections but unfortunately the system itself is
deficient that's why the public is so involved on the issue of open source thank you
okay thank you mr turner any other members of the public
no other members of the public have raised their hands okay um actually director had one other
similar question which was like the emergency ballot delivery like
about i was curious was that something else that you could track in perhaps in the future
how often that's used here okay thank you um
so on this item in the past like sometimes we've made a motion to like
um declare that the election was free fair and functional other times we didn't do
emotion it's i've heard different things but um we could either
move on or we could do a motion like that it's it's up to i think by law we just have to do an assessment
which we've done today but i'm happy to motion the motion free fair
functional election special election april 19th okay
so we have a motion by commissioner shapiro i'll second it
okay okay i will take vote well let's just um commission a discussion on the motion
seeing none any public comment we've already done
okay so um we're voting on the free fair and functional
um item five commissioner i'm sorry president
bernoullt's how do you vote yes commissioner jordanic how do you vote yes
commissioner dye aye and commissioner uh shapiro yes okay
with foreign the affirmative passes okay thank you secretary delgado so
let's move on to the next item item number six the june 7 2022
consolidated statewide direct primary election discussion and possible action regarding
the proposed election plan for the june 7 2022 consolidated statewide direct primary election
okay um direct torrence would you like to say anything about the plan that you've
presented to us so the plan is very similar to the february and april elections the
difference between the those two elections is we have 588 polling places we didn't consolidate
then also the outreach materials are new for this election versus the other two elections
um but otherwise the the plans that we've implemented are
implementing now for this election are very similar to the february and april elections so you take any
questions okay commissioners thank you director ernst
um commissioners are there any comments or questions i just had a question for director and i i'm curious i know
we're in san francisco but i'm just curious understanding the national trends of intimidation that
has been posed toward elections people current elections officials poll workers
and i wanted to be sure that um the staff is properly supported in that regard
should there be any intimidation harassment or threats um at poll sites if any have occurred i haven't read
anything that has made me question that i just wanted to make sure
that was something that was being considered yeah so we for the poor training we
if someone has an issue with a voter or campaign and have them contact the department and then we can send our
folks out there but if it's an emergency situation we we instruct the public to dial 9-1-1
uh then also we send a list of the polling places to the police so they know where the polling places are before
an election night and usually not every election i didn't do it for april at least i'll send an email to the captains
and say there's going to be an election on you know this this date and then so they know what and also some of the
polling place locations um but intimidation is you know threats
against and harming people that's not something we've experienced here uh i mean people will say mean things
but that's not there hasn't been any sort of physical intimidation or or threats
that i'm aware of um to the point where someone had to call the the police
um but we do instruct again the poll workers that uh if they do feel threatened if there's an issue that they you know they feel that
their safety is good in jeopardy to dial 9-1-1 so
do you feel that there might be a necessity to have additional
mechanisms well so there was a threat in northern california during the last recall election
obviously san francisco might be a little bit different i think i can my concern is around the
question of no you know going from having just um maybe
no clear protocol to going all the way to 9-1-1 and the type of um intensity that is
brought by police presence and a poll site so i'm just wondering if there are specific procedures that are provided to
poll workers and captains at the sites so that they are prepared for more de-escalation
um as a intermediate step before having to consider 9-1-1 as an option
again so if they have an issue that they that they think they can't address we tell them to contact the department
then we have field personnel that that are that are available for every election that can go to polling places
and support the inspectors uh you know if it's if it's a voter that's that's rude or other someone from
the public that's engaging voters or the other or the poll workers then our folks uh are trained to to
support the inspector and the poll workers not the field personnel sorry i think i missed that racially right and
they're trained for de-escalation right yeah i mean
they're not professional de-escalators i mean they're they're people that are there to support the election uh but if they have an issue that if so
if our field support then have issues we tell them to contact the the department of city hall and then you
know we we have experience with a lot of situations and on election day so we can
put usually we can help people move through moments uh but we also have the sheriff's department that's tied with us
during elections so if we did need to have someone go check out a situation without calling the police we
could ask the sheriff's department to go and then and visit a polling place as well um
but usually we're able to resolve issues that happen at the polls ourselves and we're not we're not having to call
law enforcement thank you [Music] may i follow up on that
sure go ahead president bernholtz uh thank you commissioner jerdonic director just a question if that were to
happen or if it when it does happen um these calls for some sort of de-escalation support would that show up
in any of the reports that you regularly track is that likely to be um
captured anywhere yeah that would be in the instant report that we provide after every election
that's what i thought okay thank you i have two other uh quick questions if i
may commissioner jordan of course go ahead um director orns um
i remember in a a recent election plan i don't think it was the last one i think
it was the previous prior to that there was some changes that needed to be made
because of sfusd security uh con requirements um has that all been
sorted out to the department satisfaction yes so we
uh provided extra poll workers at the schools when uh the the schools
have expressed the need for directing the public as needing security we're really what
the school district wanted was personnel to direct the public to appropriate places within the building
if if the public had arrived to vote or if they wanted to to go to uh the school itself whatever
reason but where we couldn't assign a pool worker then we would uh we we did uh
have a purchase order with a private security firm to have uh security officers at schools where we
couldn't assign poll workers but that wasn't very many especially for april and that will be the plan going forward
is that where we can where there's a request for extra poll workers or extra personnel at a school we'll assign poll workers
but if we can't fill the gap then we will ask the private security firm to to sign one of their personnel there
okay great thank you and last question um given the recent uh the
plethora of elections we've had and the trend toward very high vote by mail use
is that um affecting any of your planning in any way or um is it too soon to start thinking
about how that might uh affect certain the need for
numbers of pull sites or where they're located or anything like that we are so we're right now we're
we've started the re-precincting of the city now that redistricting is completed we are trying to re-precinct around
established polling places and also we're trying to reduce the number of precincts which would reduce
the number of polling places that we have to to support and then also the number of poll workers to recruit
so and since there is less in-person voting at the polling places although
polling places continue to be one of the uh
receive the highest number of vote by mail ballots on election days at the polling places so even though people
aren't voting at the polling places they're still going to pulling places to drop off their ballots and usually about
25 of the turnout is people going to polling places to drop off their vote by mail ballots so we don't but where we
can within the within law we are reducing the number of poll workers so that there are less
sites to support and less poll workers to recruit so yes we are we are cognizant of the of the change and and
voting habits and we are reacting to it right thank you just to follow up on that what is your expectation of or
maybe you don't have one at this point but is it possible to predict how the number of precincts might change in all
of that no and that we and i won't know that until probably into july because we just
started that process and then we're in the june cycle right now so we'll have to come out of june and pick up the representing again
got it great thank you so much you're welcome i had a couple of questions
is is san francisco um a voter's choice no it is not no okay
so uh what are the considerations in re-precincting then in terms of
what's what's what's guiding that in terms of uh um how that's determined i don't know
anything about that process so so we so one of the first considerations is if
there's an established polling place we can use from election to election because
if you can if you can standardize a polling place for voters in an area like a neighborhood center or something right
and then then they just know on election day that's where they can go so there's there's no way for us to issue notices
in the mail that they're pulling places different or put change signs at a previous location on election day
there's just there's just an expectation that the polling place will be available like we don't we don't control those
sites and people often think that we do so when they change they become upset but where we know like like schools for
instance the rec centers a lot of churches that we use uh so we're that's when the first
considerations then we just apply the same rules that we do when we precinct usually and that's
uh the you know the the geography uh the path to the polling place you
know is there they have to do people have to cross a you know multi-lane road to get there um
uh you know is there a steep is there a steep hill on the path of travel
and things like that so and we also don't want voters to to be more than than six to eight blocks from
their polling place and so we're not we're not creating these geographically large precincts and
then we also try to consider there's some there's some areas where there's more in-person voting than others
and so where there's but there's others where there's far more vote-by-mail voting than other precincts so we also take that into
consideration when when drawing our precinct boundaries got it
so do you anticipate have you noticed enough of a behavior
change with the new ballot box infrastructure that might cause the department to consider
reducing the number of polling places or is there a bias toward maintaining the
phone so we we we do want to reduce the number of holding places we think
and we can within law so the law allows the number of minister voters in the
precinct to be 1 000. there is an exceptional law if the number of i forgot the number of permanent vote by
male voters in the precinct is less than the total number of permitable by mails in the city
but then you can you can have more more people in that precinct but with
everyone getting a ballot in the mail now there's everyone's essentially a permanent vote by mail voter yeah so then if we go a little bit over a
thousand then we could we can run with that but we still try to stay within
right around a thousand which is the the traditional size of of a precinct
but even that would help a lot because our going into the previous representing our we averaged 850 people per per
precinct because we expected some growth along the way but now with the vote by mail and using this code section we know
that we can we can stay around a thousand and not really worry too much about going over a
thousand when preparing the the precincts and really focusing on having stable
pulling places from election to election is like our like our first criteria
yeah people people get very upset when you move their polling place it's the thing i get honestly it's one
of the things i get the most calls about is pulling places have changed yeah when i was a poll inspector that was the biggest complaint um i have personally
observed my own behavior changing so i you know used to love going
to vote in person on election day and see like how many votes have been counted
and just to you know see what the activity was like um but with pandemic
you know got my vote by mail first time dropped it off you know at the city hall
uh last time um you know use the ballot box
right by the library and so it's like you know
so convenient now right and um you know and i actually walk by
my local polling place and nothing was happening it was really really dead yeah so i'm just wondering
if um if if san francisco will get to a point
where it it goes for vote centers instead what's your thought on that i don't know
we uh i think it was two years ago now the board requested that we submit a plan
to move to the voter's choice act which we did okay and so we submitted that plan to the board
and there was that and the board never really picked it up so uh so there is something that we've already
done to to um that chronicles the move to voters choice act
but at the same time there's still a lot of support for polling places in san francisco and there's still a lot of support for having as many options as
possible for people to cast ballots and i know there's a lot of there's still a lot of support for uh
for having people be poll workers because they do receive a stipend right
to be a poll worker um so uh so i think in san francisco now that
there's still the thought to provide as much opportunity to people to vote and also to provide people
uh to participate in the process and also to earn that stipend on election day and then we are increasing the stipend
uh going into november election as well so um trying to keep up with with inflation a
bit so that will potentially bring more people still to be poll workers yeah i do think that's a
a good consideration it's part of the racial equity plan as well i you know and i think it's an opportunity to
introduce high school kids to the you know the process of democracy so i think there's probably a trade-off there in
terms of the cost of having so many polling places given that we're such a high vote by male city
anyway um so when was the the study done for the
plan for the voters choice act uh we i think we submitted february of 2021 of last year
but the vote the cost would be more to run the voter's choice act than the polling place model interesting yeah
because the secretary of the technology that's involved the number of staff that you need uh to be present at at the vote centers
because it's not just like an election day uh operation it's several weeks
right right right okay um that that's helpful information i didn't actually know that uh i would
have assumed it would have been cheaper i would is it just logistically more complex i rang all the number of
temporary poll workers and kind of gearing up for 588 polling places
no because it's still a one-day operation and that so you get more buy-in from people uh
that way but if you have a multi-day um that's that's more challenging okay
so thank you that's helpful um i have one other question there was a comment in
the voting plan about the language access how the secretary of state had kind of
relieved us of four of the five languages or something and then reinstated it can you can you
tell me what was behind that and did san francisco just make a different choice to to do more
anyway yeah so so so there's a state law that requires secretary of
state to do an analysis of language uh needs for precincts in every
county the the state draws information from the statewide database it's a group in
berkeley that actually helps support the registering task force so they compile this information that i
think they get from with the american community survey it's probably one of the probably other sources as well
and then i don't know if a law changed or if there's a different interpretation of of
the law but the secretary of state's office issued notice that in san francisco we had no need to go beyond
the three languages that we currently support and but we know that we can't withdraw
language support so we never really plan to follow the advice from the secretary of state's office but then even though
we are still engaged in with our plans to provide the five additional language for facsimile ballots and also some
noticing um the secretary of state came back with another notice essentially
saying that no we're we're reinstating the previous language support for the counties
um they have gone on in previous elections so so nothing really changed for us we didn't we didn't plan otherwise but the
secretary of state i don't know what it was i mean they were acting on something right they didn't just arbitrarily decide to
to change the criteria or to put out different advice um but yes as far as the state is
concerned as far as san francisco is concerned all the languages that were previously supported there's no support
in right got it thank you okay i had a few questions but i wanted
to start out with a follow-up to one of the questions that commissioner dai had asked regarding voting centers um since
everyone is getting a vote by mail ballot these days like what is what are the reasons people use the early voting
center because i guess before that you could go there to um vote even if you didn't receive a
vote by mail ballot so like what are the reasons that people go into city hall to vote
i don't know the reasons why people come to city hall but the services that are available are again people can get
replacement ballots if they made a mistake uh they can register to vote they can change their registration
information they can vote in person prior to election day
just so whatever they what they want to have a the i voted sticker and get their picture taken in front of city hall i
mean there's a number of reasons why um we don't really we don't track that but it's the same services that have
been available through time okay and then remind me again if you vote at city hall does your is your ballot scanned by the
scanner at that time or is it done later on with the vote by mail ballots
so the the ballots that are issued from the voting center are essentially vote by mail ballots okay and so they so the
ballots that are cast at city hall would be processed along with the vote by mail balance of receiving in the mail
okay all right thank you yes so then my other questions are um
so we've talked about the emergency ballot delivery in the past a little bit kind of you know the idea of mobile
voting and things like that but um and i i saw a reference to this in the
plan but um do [Music] so do do you provide a ballot marketing
device in those cases ever would you actually bring one into the person or if someone requested we would you would and
then you'd have to like plug it in and then put it up and things okay and then um on the drop boxes i noticed
there are some references to having to clean them and things like that is that because they're being vandalized at all
or or is that inside the box or it's on the exterior and they are being
graffitied and there's also you know pets are using the boxes and then
other other uses so we have to clean the areas around and also on the boxes
is that a significant problem you think or just as a minor depends on that area turns an area okay
um and then another thing is i was reading about the
the waiting time app and how does that work i guess i hadn't realized i had forgotten that you're
doing that but how does that work for a normal precinct do you know so there are a few election deputies will send the
information in using their app an app on their phones that we developed and then that provides
like a sense of what the wait times are at polling places so it's it's not like a real-time type
thing it's no okay and then um
okay and then the other question was about the languages which you had asked so all right so that's that's all i had to ask you thank you for all the work on
the plan drug turns so um let's open it up to
or was there any other comments or questions people had before we open it up to public comment
i i enjoy the slogan
i was going to ask you who comes up with them with the the wooden background yeah
yeah okay so let's open it up to public comment on this item
i don't see any hands raised oh i do now caller you're unmuted you have three
minutes to speak yes thank you commissioners and thank
you director orange for the overview uh it certainly is delivered with a a nice
kindly fashion and and the public appreciates that unfortunately and i know
the tenor of this call has put me in a bit of a box and i and i
feel like uh you know there's some resistance here too to public comment and this is probably
going to make it worse but unfortunately it's hard to really
give um clear thought and gravity to your plan
because i think there's a general lack of confidence now um
because of the history of of our county and where we are
um with our systems it's hard to talk about these things
and not acknowledge the fact that we are terribly behind the eight ball here when
we talk about uh cost it's really hard to fathom because of
course we don't want to sacrifice um the ability for the voters to have as
much access as possible and when we talk about the voters choice act we have to
recognize some things about uh when when we're talking about
minimizing the amount of uh access points for the public
we we have to realize you're also talking about central tabulation
issues which we're sort of forced i guess to centrally tabulate obviously
from a security perspective it would be ideal to tabulate at the precinct level
but i don't think we're going to be able to go in that direction uh previous transportation of ballots
there should be a hard count gathered naturally and then the small batches
would be accumulated that would be ideal but if we're going to centrally tabulate
um i i think we really need to get a clear look at this plan and unfortunately i i just have to state
clearly that the public has lost confidence in in director ernst at this
moment and it's not just to to his ability to speak kindly and deliver
plans succinctly so thank you
okay thank you mr turner
any other members of the public do we have one other caller who would like to um speak
taller you are admitted you heard three minutes can you hear me now
yes we can hear you great uh david bill phil again so um i respectfully disagree um with uh the
previous uh speaker i do continue to support uh director orns and his
competent leadership of the department i
did not take a great amount of time to go through the june election plan but
i'm sure it fairly and accurately describes the procedures involved in the
june election and i support it and encourage you to adopt it as the election plan for the
june 22 election thanks
see if there's anyone else i don't see any other callers okay so commissioners on this item um i
think the motion we would have before us is you know whether to approve the plan
and move we approve the plan for the june 7th election second okay we have a second by commissioner
shapiro any uh remaining discussion before we take a vote commissioners
okay seeing none secretary delgado okay uh president vernon how do you vote
yes commissioner gerdonic yes commissioner dye aye and commissioner shapiro yes
okay before the in the affirmative it passes okay let's move on to item number seven
commission annual report for 2021. discussion and possible action regarding the commission annual report for 2021.
so i'm president bernholtz i'll turn this one over to you but um
i want to mention that the packet item for this was only posted today so i think um just i'm not sure if
you knew that president reynolds but okay uh thank you yes i
i believe uh was the whole packet well it doesn't matter parts of the packet were
definitely uploaded late i want to thank uh previous uh president mogee and
secretary delgadillo for helping to pull together the draft annual report the two attachments oh i
see on the thing yes they were all up uploaded today uh so i would suggest that we use this time
for any uh comments and input from the public and other commissioners on the draft here but we delay any
action until the next meeting in june this is a required
requirement of the commission that we do file this annual report so we want to make sure it is complete and useful for
publix purposes okay and thank you president reynolds um
are there any comments or questions for yeah i have a couple um
i don't think we need item 3.4 since it's for last year is it not
um i think it can probably be deleted and then the other question i had was um
there's like a title with no number and no description
at the end right before the signature line remote ballot
completion and submission for people with access and functional needs project
so there were two questions actually that i was asking yeah so
those are my questions i'm not i'm not able to provide any
questions because i did not receive this until just now so
unfortunately okay participate in this conversation so um thank you for that comment uh
commissioner dye on the 3.4 yes you're absolutely right that can be
removed uh assuming it was addressed in the 2020 report
as for the remote ballot completion and submission for people with access and functional needs project
um this should be numbered and uh some information provided on this assuming uh secretary
delgado which reference being referenced here is the um issue that arose toward the end of last
year regarding the um uh the work with the department of
technology the department of homeland securing all of that is that what we're talking about here
yes it is okay yes so thank you very much we need to um provide a full or expo a complete
explanation of that and we should do that by the next draft okay can i make a comment is that okay
sure okay so item 3.4 is there but if i were to take it out then it would affect
all the numbering of the items behind it and historically when i was looking at it 3.4 contains something so
maybe i can just say secretary from 2020 continued through
2021 is that well i don't think the numbering needs to remain the same you could just yeah just just number it okay
then i'll just take it out thank you i think that's right great thank you uh and martha you and i can work uh on
that text for the final uh what would become 3.7 i presume if yes we remember this
yeah okay right thank you so um if i may i have a couple comments um
on the open source voting one one suggestion i would make would be to um attach the resolutions that we
passed i think there were two maybe a third one i don't quite remember
got it yes yeah and then and then on the yuasi thing um i mean we
i guess we've already made this point but just to have some narrative i think maybe even highlight the meeting we had in december
where the directors were present yes and um and then i think the two
attachments that are there i'm not sure um those are needed
um i guess one of them just seems to be one of the monthly reports but um
oh and also i think i think the um the letter that president bernholtz wrote regarding
yuasi might be worth attaching as well that um had a lot of good information in
it very good thank you just i'm just checking the attachments
excuse me so one of them is the budget and the other is
yeah i did have i wondered the same thing um i don't know uh why the
director's report for september 17th was uploaded as part of this
maybe because it was the only election that was held i think it just had maybe it had some
information about what secretary delgado do you know
it did i i had it in the appendix i had the appendix in there but i don't see
them now and it did it was a question for me if and i was referring to where i
i gleaned the information i see so maybe
well i'll leave it up to the two of you but maybe you could just pull out the information from there it
did need clarification okay okay so martha and i can follow up to
make sure that the i believe i think the budget should be attached but i think
we can pull the information out and add the other items as suggested by the
commissioners die in turdonic just now okay and this is just a really a knit but
since we are going to be approving this after the february 2022 meeting which
actually happened on february 14th i wonder if you just want to refer to um january and february meetings or the
next two meetings for item 3.7 which will now be 3.6
just because it might be confusing since we know the meeting actually happened on february 14th right february
16. good thank you
okay are there um any other comments and commissioner shapiro apologies for
that just on behalf of um you know the people involved in posting
that but i think if you have comments you could provide them yeah thank you i definitely will review thank you
appreciate that yeah okay so let's open it up to public comment on this item
okay we do have one caller on the line caller you're unmuted and you have three minutes
uh it's david pilfel again uh i'm back some uh thoughts on the report i would
uh i think not include the two uh attachments i think they can be referenced
but i i don't find them particularly uh helpful to badge the report
on page two i noticed a couple of quick things
um whereas a 2.3 uh i think i would word that as the
director of elections hired by the elections plural commission uh serves as the department head not executive of the
san francisco department of elections 2.5 the deputy city attorney i would
capital d uh deputy uh in the text not the header um
three and four is really the uh the important cages uh that discuss the commission activities i might have like
an overview that said the commission met x number of uh times and um
uh vopek x number of times uh key topics included
uh redistricting open source uh the the single uh recall election blah
blah blah as further uh discussed the the budget i think that's a fair
summary of the budget but that's also discussed uh elsewhere um [Music]
issues with webex are discussed in 3.3 were both
the directors performance evaluation and the commission secretary i think they're both supposed to have an annual evaluation if that occurred during the
reporting period i would indicate that if it didn't i would probably note that as well
i thought it a bit odd that the performance evaluation referred to in 3.7 was actually outside the reporting
period and during 2022 and this is um uh on the the cover suggests that this
is uh an annual report for calendar year 2021
and it says if approved on july 21 that if approved lineup needs to be
updated all right anyway um i just would have as much uh a relevant narrative on
pages three and four that cover the commission activities um and say
and maybe have something else at the end that agendas and minutes are available on the website blah blah blah
audio is available perhaps some video if it exists that it i i would just give a
tell the story of what the commission did during calendar year 2021 the department is already uh well covered on
its website and i don't think the substitutes for an annual report for the department it's the annual report of the
commission's activities i hope that's helpful um thanks for listening
thank you
so anyone else republican i don't see any other hands raised okay um commissioner and i did you know
yeah so i i i think um mr pillpill was referring to the first
page uh the comment on the first page that has the approval date of july 21st
2021 so obviously that that should be updated to whatever the correct date is
but i thought his suggestions were good okay sounds good is there anyone else before we move on
okay so let's move on to and thank you both for your work on this um president bernhardson and secretary delgado we'll
revisit this at the next meeting okay item number eight open source voting discussion and possible action
8. Open Source Voting
regarding open source voting including the status of the open source voting pilot for the november 2022 election
okay so before i turn this over to director ernst for an update i just wanted to mention um
in the agenda packet they're um there was an op-ed that was
published in a online magazine called cal matters and then director ernst has two attachments to his director's report i
put underneath this item because it was related to this one is this letter from the secretary of state and then the
other the draft regulations and then the other two items i'll i'll mention after we have
our discussion in the pilot but direct currents would you like to provide an update on this
as the letter from the secretary of state indicates which is attached to this item
uh the secretary of state denied the application for the open source program
for november uh the three items that were listed in the in the letter are that the system's not
yet fully developed uh the ranked choice voting isn't uh developed
for san francisco and third one was oh and also the vendor had in the use
procedures removed the scanner from the pilot program
which also removes the opportunity to conduct a risk limited auditing a risk
limiting audit uh using the deposit using the system during the pilot program and the risk
limiting audit is required in the under the statute uh so the secretary of state she had a
call with the vendor was on the on the call i was there president shimon walton
the state attorney's office secretary of state's office of course and secretary webber indicated
that why she was denying the application and then also that her office was
developing the regulations for private programs and then one of the attachments are the
draft regulations for conducting pilot programs minus
an open source system regulations for for piloting an open source system which i understand are coming soon
um and i forget what that i forgot my directory reports i don't know i forgot the uh the time frame of giving comments
to the regulations but that's in my i think it's at the at the end of my director's report
uh the the secretary of state's office is also following the june election setting up monthly calls with the
parties so people can track the uh the progress on the pilot program
um and that's where things stand right now okay thank you
um i also want to just add a couple comments as well but um before i do that
i do want to mention that matt rowe from votingworks is president today i want to thank you know him for his patience for
being here and he'll have a chance to say something during public comment but um
oh okay so then um then we can actually just a moment i
want to mention one thing first and then we'll have you speak but um
yeah it is it was quite disappointing that that the pilot plan was was denied um i think in
my own view i think basically what happened is there was a mismatch and expectations in terms of what
um we had submitted to them and then what the secretary of state is expecting and i think we can kind of trace that
to the lack of any kind of regulation so there was no kind of target or goal posts so to speak
to aim for but um i mean i think the one positive
outcome of this is that the secretary of state is now finally starting this process
and as director once mentioned they're going to be meeting monthly with people from san francisco and
president walton brought me into those as well so i'll have a chance to
sit in those meetings but um [Music] so um
yeah but man i'll give you a chance to mr rowe um to speak as well if if you
wanted to comment on on this process
no it's not on let's um we will turn it on momentarily
let me give it a shot
so yeah unfortunately um secretary delgado stepped out maybe maybe we can just use this microphone is
that okay come on in
are we on now yeah great uh for the record matt rowe voting works i've spoken to the election
commission a few times now um thank you for having me in person though um yeah i do want to just reiterate um
what commissioner jerdonek was saying ultimately this comes down to uh the lack of clarity being provided
from the secretary of state's office from the beginning on what the requirements for a pilot program are
or even what is considered a pilot in the first place um now to
address um director aaron's summary in terms of the reasons for the denial um
the we can kind of trace that back to the lack of clarity in the first place so
as it relates to the system not being completed this is something we've been discussing um there were some aspects of
the system we were developing that were specific for san francisco the secretary of state's office never
provided any guidance on when a system needed to be completed in the pilot plan itself we provided a suggestion as to
what we thought was reasonable given the de-risking of the program and the date in which we did not think
would have any negative impact to the election i'd like to point out that in their response
they cite a timeline that doesn't really apply to the pilot program
given the scope of the pilot itself to the second point in terms of
uh that it does not meet the aspect of the risk limiting audit um
this is actually an a this is actually in response to us trying to further de-risk the pilot where there was not
any aspect of tabulation involved and our proposal which we thought was reasonable was
providing full manual tally of all the results which actually exceeds the requirement
in a risk limiting on it you could actually think of it as a risk limiting audit with no risk limit um and that was
met um unfortunately uh with uh um
seen as uh not not being in line now i am glad that we are getting some
clarity um around the use procedures or around the regulations for
the voting system more generally however the voting system or for a pilot program more generally it
does clarify a few things that we intend to discuss with the secretary of state's office in further meetings
that being one when a system needs to be completed by
in the in their proposal thus far for the draft regulations they are saying nine months
in advance aka when the pilot uh application is submitted um that's clear we can discuss them in the future um
what that looks like and then the second aspect that i think
we've discussed previously um in the context of
this meeting was what level of sort of pre-documentation
is actually required to submit to the secretary of state's office this was something that in the
initial response we got back in november from the secretary of state's office regarding
the regulations they provided us some initial clarity around what we should submit that is
what we did submit however after submitting it we were told you need to basically submit the entirety of
documentation that would effectively um be equivalent to a formal certification
application that is the stance that is being taken in the current draft regulations um
which will hopefully in these further meetings discuss that um and voting works as well will be providing um an
independent um suggestion on draft regulations thank you mr rowe
um just before we open it up to questions secretary delgado while you're gone we had a
problem turning on that microphone so the public microphone do you know how to
do that
i don't mind there i was gonna say he looks comfortable yeah okay so um so commissioners let's um
i guess i'll just open it up to questions for either director arts or um
mr rowe [Music] if anyone wants to uh president reynolds
thank you and i want to thank both um voting works and uh director arts and of
course commissioner donek for all of your work on this um question for anyone who might know the
answer is has anything changed in terms of whether any other jurisdiction
submitted um or uh intends to submit a pilot project or
anything do we know of anyone else moving in this direction in california or elsewhere
right in california in california no no one else has submitted an application elsewhere i
wouldn't know okay um thanks matt
yeah so i was just gonna add um we have been in discussions with a handful of other counties outside of san
francisco uh regarding a pilot program one of the reasons why a pilot program application was not submitted in
addition to san francisco was due to the lack of clarity um and wanting to see what the secretary of state's office
response uh something would be um we do expect to um have at least one or two
other counties submitting pilot program applications early next year or earlier
okay great thank you um i wanted to just draw people's attention to um
[Music] a part of the draft regulations that i uh feel is critical and i don't think
has been discussed enough in all of the many discussions about open source
voting um that this commission has had and that is and i'm apologizing i noticed that
every section in this attachment is labeled section x so i can't rule i guess it's on page four
section x subsection b um at least it's on page four of my pdf
the following shall be developed and provided to the secretary of state a method to monitor code access a method
to manage code contributions a method to track code versioning and the process for reporting any defect failure fault
bugging or vulnerability um i find that our conversations about open source
voting over the years that i've been involved in them have been um
almost binary as if to uh and i understand that the
arguments that open source code can be more secure um that proprietary code is a black box
i get all of that but open source code is only secure if it's kept secure and um if there are actual eyes on it uh
not just theoretically but in reality and so um this is just a comment uh for how i
might be thinking about this going forward which is i i do believe that that those particular requirements are
absolutely critical and that any vendor putting forward an open source system
um as a pilot or as a uh as a an actual option but certainly in a
pilot phase where the department is already too stretched and has made it very clear that they do not have the expertise to do that
some um formalized program by which there are going to be independent eyes on the code shouldn't
just be assumed actually should be somehow structured in to the degree that that's possible
otherwise where you know we may have a system that can be monitored but there's just you know
if you build it doesn't mean anybody comes and so uh i was quite um relieved
uh and and grateful and glad to see that section in the regulations there may be others in there as well
but i just wanted to bring that out um so that those are all the comments i have if there's any response to that i'm
happy to hear it but it's really just a general comment about the shape of the conversation so far and where i hope
how i hope it might change going forward
okay um did
i don't was that was there a question there or did did either of you want to respond to that or
i'm happy to provide a little more clarity that might might help um all right
sorry director arts mentioned that uh there is an aspect of the regulations that have not um been provided in a
draft form to us that's what they're referring to as the open source governance model a lot
of that is basically how the jurisdiction and the state itself will track changes and
understand how that occurs um basically what the process is for not only tracking but modifying the code in the
first place as i do and ideally also what is the process or um you know third-party uh penetration
testing or further certification um testing of the system great thank you that's very helpful
thank you mr rowe okay um
yes so um can either of you comment on
[Music] the relationship between what we've been trying to advance in san francisco with
a pilot with the voting solutions for all people
documentation that was also included that appears to have come out of la county
so let me yeah let me make a comment on that i um so i attached two documents to the
agenda packet they're not necessary for you to read but i just wanted them to be on the public record and these are two
documents that i had gotten by way of a public records request
and these are documents a document that l.a county submitted to the secretary of state in
october of 2021 and that was la county's preliminary plan to make
their system open source and i think the key bit of information there in that document is that
they are um currently their system may be open source as early
as august 2023 and um that's just
so right now vsap is not open source at all but there's a chance that it could become open source
in august 2023 so that that is kind of the status there
yeah it just seemed um and mr rowe it seemed like there were
people from voting works that were involved in [Music] the the advisory council or
yes um we do have some context in terms of um the processes of the advisory council and there are members of our
team um that are on that ultimately though uh what the purpose of that council has served as thus far is
providing guidance as to what a governance model should be and ultimately it's basically going to
be providing guidance for those regulations um we will see when it actually those regulations are
promulgated um that said i don't have any additional information as to when
vsap itself will if at all open source that system
which i think i'm not sure exactly which documents were in this packet um but i
think it is worth clarifying just because we've gone back and forth around did
this program fall under uh an open source pilot program or not
um and over the course of my experience working with secretary of state recently
i have come to learn that although there was a pilot of the system approved for use the system had already
filed and uh begun the process of complete formal certification um so it's
not really a direct comparison to a situation that we were in so it the way that i understood it it's
a system that was developed for la county and they're talking about making it open
source so they got it certified as a they got a private proprietary system right now certified just is a normal
voting system right um and in the process uh to before the first use of
the system as a certified system they ran a pilot of the system as a normal voting system no no actually
that's actually incorrect there it was under the assumption that it would be an open source system eventually yes um
so this is a this is just a case where we didn't have um
everyone was working with limited information um in in terms of it was this an example that we could use
um to potentially inform a pilot here in san francisco so i don't know the
answer to this does la doesn't have rank does it it doesn't have ranked choice voting does it
i do not believe valley county does okay so because one of my questions is
if they make it open source is this something we could use and it would only be something san francisco could use if
someone developed a ranked choice voting module
is that correct well i mean i think we don't really know
i mean there could be other requirements but yes certainly that minimum that would need to be
a change that would need to be made too much
so um mr i do have one question for you and that's um
as i think it was in one of the um [Music] packet documents
it was mentioned that the um if we want we could submit a plan for a
pilot in a future year like in 2023 and i wanted to ask you what your um like interest level was on
that in terms of trying again in the future yeah i mean as i referred to beforehand we're still interested in
pursuing open source pilots with any counties in california that are interested in pursuing it um i think in
terms of the scope of the pilot itself we may need to modify it purely based off of
the feedback we've already received from the california secretary of state that we'll have confirmed
in the future and my suggestion if there is interest still from the
commission and potentially from the department uh that we try to do this at the soonest
possible date um and that could be as soon as a special election if there was one early next year
okay all right thanks
commissioner um so director arts is there a plan for the
department to respond to the draft regulations because i think it's only 30 days that they
at this time no i don't plan on responding to those regulations okay as far as comments but mr rowe you
said you would be responding and providing input on the draft regulations yes
i i i don't know if it was appropriate for the elections commission to respond i know that it's not possible for us to
do that within the short amount of time it's not actually well i think i am going to be
participating in these monthly meetings so if if you have feedback you could provide it to me
directly or um or now or um
but also these meetings are just it's sort of like preliminary before it's
going to be posted for the official 45-day public comment period so um there's going to be multiple
opportunities yeah okay but yeah if you have
comments now feel free to let me know and to deputies to the attorney photos these meetings are open to the public um
so anyone can participate and submit comments about the draft regulations and
i think that's the intention that's a good point
well i think it's uh good that they're drafting regulations because
from the email trail before i definitely look like it just changed every time that they
didn't know what they wanted and then they which different person would look at it and then they would ask for something else
so i think this is a very positive development and hopefully
it happens faster than it took them to draft the regulations for the california citizens redistricting commission it
took 18 months for them to drop regulations for that if i may
one thing that is is missing um sort of from this conversation is what our
expectation of a pilot as like the noun is in the first place
um and because from the initial conversations we had with this commission the idea behind this was
let's do something in an iterative collaborative process with san francisco
in a d scope de-risked way and that's what i would call a pilot doing something small doing something
that we can work on with feedback going forward together um and the initial
draft regulations seem to be suggesting that a pilot may mean something else it
may mean to the secretary of state's office something closer to a complete certified system that is just being used
in a well you know less than 50 percent of the jurisdiction and that's the real aspect of
clarification that i'm looking for so that we can hopefully in a future election commission meeting have a conversation about what a pilot really
does mean yeah yeah so hopefully we'll have a lot of these questions answered over the next
um however many months the process takes okay um
commissioners are there any other um comments or questions before we move on to public comment okay
um mr o thank you for you know making it here and direct currents thank you for
your work on this um thank you both and i appreciate all the time that the commission and the
director has put into this okay thank you so um
secretary delgado if you could open it up to public comment we do have one caller on the line caller
you are unmuted and you have three minutes to comment yes thank you commissioners and uh
thanks to uh matt rowe and voting works for their patients and their dignity on
this matter um uh we we keep getting
interesting information from the secretary of state's office i think to
respond to one of the commissioners and their thoughts about los angeles just to be clear
open voting consortium alan deckard and myself initiated the los angeles vsapp uh
program uh we we worked with a some of the early
supervisors down there antonovich and uh move that forward unfortunately
um the open source community that uh mr rowe and his group is
ably represents they were at the time of the initial uh
endeavor there was nobody from the open source community uh involved in that particular
situation that's why you have 300 million dollars missing and you still don't have an open source system so this
shows the gravity of folks like microsoft like dominion
dean logan doesn't want open source i would venture to guess
that because 14 years later here we are john arndt does not want open source in
san francisco and uh steve bennett is is the other guy that doesn't want open
source there's basically there's three main people that don't want open source that's dean logan john arndt and steve
bennett so if it gets confusing and you're trying to figure out what's going on here it is confusing i think it's
almost made intentionally confusing but make no mistake as i stated before the current systems are substandard the only
people in the room that really know what they're talking about with this technology at this point is voting works
so the secretary of state would be very well served to pay attention to what voting works is saying i know matt and
his group are far too polite to be so blunt but this is the reality because we're in a national security
problem right now with getting voting systems proper by 2024 and maybe now
we're pushed back to 2028 the country is really dependent upon this work and so
it's not a moment where we should not be blunt and i'm not being very well spoken
because i'm a little upset here but it is very clear that votingworks knows how to lead on this issue the department of
uh elections and even the department of technology for san francisco they're out of their league with this open source
stuff we need open source people that understand the future technologies that can come in for security and
president bernholtz mentioned we need eyes on the code that's true but that's also a microsoft talking point as if the
systems would be built sorry and then your time has expired i'm sorry mr turner that's okay thank you very much
for your minutes thank you okay thank you mr turner
any other commenters no other callers have raised your hands okay um
all right then i've seen no other comments let's move on to the next item
thank you thank you again um
9. Dominion Voting Systems Contract Extension
so actually this next item number nine dominion voting systems contract
extension i'm gonna be skipping past this item and at the last meeting
we had been decided that i would discuss this resolution with um
vice president um chapel and she because she wasn't here today um
[Music] you know i'm just gonna wait until the next meeting when she'll be present to be able to speak to
on what we come up with so the packet document on this was really just reflecting the changes that we discussed
at the last meeting along with the fact that the pilot was not approved
so um let's move on to item number 10 redistricting
process oh sure
just to clarify this is dca photos just to clarify um um
are you um skipping this item or are you tabling this item it will not be heard today is that does
that mean tabling yes okay it's this is table for today
10. Redistricting Process Improvements
so item number 10 redistricting process improvements discussion and possible action regarding recommendations to
improve san francisco's redistricting process including the selection composition of the redistricting task
force redistricting criteria and other decision making processes and which may
be incorporated into a charter amendment so um commissioner dye this is an item
that you had requested so i will turn it over to you to um speak about this item
thank you commissioner gerdonic um so there are a couple of attachments for
this item one is a detailed and thoughtful letter from
good government groups including asian americans advancing justice asian
law caucus common cause california common cause and the leak of women voters who have been
watchdogs for redistricting for san francisco as well as
at the state level and then the second attachment is um
a document that i put together after our marathon
public um uh input and special meetings
that were requested to kind of consider
whether to withdraw or replace our appointees on the redistricting task force
and what i wanted uh to do was for the elections commission to have a
thoughtful discussion on what went wrong um
and so uh i put this document together hoping to provide kind of a brief
summary of kind of structural reforms that
are pretty well acknowledged as best practices for independent citizens redistricting
bodies when as i mentioned in the preamble here
san francisco was way ahead of the rest of the state when it put uh an independent citizen's
body together when it established the the redistricting task force uh
at the time uh to do this at a at a local level was
really unusual it's no longer unusual thanks to a bunch of changes in the
state law that now a lot allow for independent redistricting
bodies at the local level many of the local bodies are advisory because that
was all that was allowed previously but the law has changed and now
i believe there are about 15 cities that use an independent citizens
commission or task force to do redistricting and
six counties including san francisco so
as most of you know i i worked i i served on the california citizens redistricting commission uh the first
one for 10 years and as a result of that had the honor of
working with 11 states trying to institute independent redistricting reform
and also trained 11 cities and counties
so a lot of the examples i put in here are from the commissions that i that i personally trained
so would it be useful for me to run through this really quickly or did everyone have a chance to
to look at it yes when i do breed okay good
anyone else want me to just run through it or do you have questions that i can address
some through some examples please um well you had one higher level question
before you go through it but um can you just explain to us how your document um
compares to the the recommendations in the letter are they like yes so the letter is yeah
i would say there's some overlap the letter is um you know quite detailed the
letter puts for specific recommendations whereas i try to actually refrain from
specific remedies because i wanted this to be a discussion document that this commission
comes up with uh group you know recommendations and suggestions
for consideration in as a public discussion so that uh
anyone who might put forth the charter amendment which we can decide if that's something
that we want to work on as a group but you know as you know could come from the
public it could come from the board of supervisors it could come from the mayor's office but i thought it was appropriate for us as the san francisco
elections commission to have this discussion in the public because
we cannot ensure fair elections if the redistricting process is
is not does not have a good outcome let's just say so i think that it's part
of our mandate to even though we do not have oversight over the task force which i i think is
appropriate by the way um but i do think that we have a direct vested interest in making sure it
runs well and that it
improves and improves the public's faith
in the in democracy in san francisco and so that's that's the i would say the main
difference i did put comments um which i tried to keep as factual as
possible uh but but yeah i didn't uh i didn't come with specific
recommendations because i think that's for us to come up with as a group do you mind if i just jump in for a
moment um thank you um and thank you for putting the work into this it was very helpful um and i
left me actually with millions of more questions i think there are two things that are
immediately um items i want to address
one is i don't think it's clear still who oversees the task force
um and then number two i'd really love to know and perhaps maybe i miss this when their report is
anticipated to be submitted um because it's posted now it is posted
now yeah it's supposed to be so perhaps that could be included in the next packet agenda because
i don't feel that i can i i would want to be able to read the
report and also do an audit i mean i've read in the press i've i've listened to some of the clips but i
don't feel capable of having a thoughtful and informed discussion about what happened
and how to make it better until that happens yeah so as i understand it the
they have posted their draft report uh they're taking comments until tomorrow i think and then they're going to finalize
the report actually they came up with some specific recommendations that would not be inconsistent with my
chart here but i'm actually more concerned about kind of the structural design
of the commission one of the things that you know the california citizens
redistricting commission and many of the others that were modeled on the crc
[Music] you know benefited from is is putting in place structures and
processes to ensure that any group of you know and number of commissioners
that were appointed or selected would would have a good result
and not leaving it to chance and i feel like san francisco's been lucky the last two cycles and then we basically saw
what happened when it didn't get lucky because i i i've as i stated at the last
meeting i really think that all of the problems in san francisco came from poor planning
and not thinking about the timeline and when they would need to get things done and
many of the complaints for example about language access
i mean san francisco does tremendous work to provide language access i mean
the elections department does tremendous work and elections department i believe supported the
redistricting task force in this in in large part um but if you don't give enough time
you know to schedule translators and you know show up meetings that are happening at three in the morning i mean
it's not going to happen so so things that should have worked didn't because of
poor planning and and not paying attention to a timeline and so
so if you look at all the best practices there are deadlines besides just the
last one right there there's a requirement for a draft map there's a requirement that i
happen a certain amount of time before the final deadline and you know to allow public comment to
allow people to absorb it to allow the um the public to work with the task force to come up with a more
creative solution that addresses everyone's concern and you don't get the kind of acrimony and
you know the bad behavior uh that i think that we witnessed so i i think
a lot of things can be fixed in the design of of the body so
you know like i said you don't need to know the details of what happened in this process to to understand um the problems and
yeah just to respond to that i i i think it's particularly valuable to
understand that what is a best practice what i don't feel uh
informed about is what structure they were following um and
that's what i was talking about i said the press and my own sort of like i want to read how they operated based on their
own understanding and i haven't read the draft but i think it's hard to for for me as a
speaking on my own to provide you know a post-mortem if i don't and
strategic recommendations for future structure you know one thing that is very tangible for me is i want to really read
what they say about how they incorporated community feedback i don't feel that that was
very clear or transparent from the special meeting or um to the community so you know i want
to understand what they perceive to be their process right so
that i can better understand and i believe i could you off commissioner jordan so oh no he didn't i i it's fine
um okay so i mean i could i could make a comment
too but president bernhard's do you did you want to chime in at all on anything or just do it
um i mean my comments are um i'm very grateful to commissioner dye
for pulling this together i think the city and county of san francisco was fortunate to have someone
with her uh breadth of experience i do think there are
um at the very least uh
i i'm wrestling with two different levels of engagement with this issue
there's the complete uh well
let me for the moment assume that what is presented here is a fairly comprehensive
set of of considerations um i'm not in a position to judge if it's what it's
missing but if it is a fairly comprehensive set of considerations i think this commission needs to think
about um or or be better informed than i at least
am on to whom might we be making certain recommendations and what is the best
process for this commission to inform ourselves enough to make such
recommendations so that's speaking to the entire process the second level which i'm looking at this is
um and this is based as much on commissioner dye's document as on my own reflections on this there is a specific
role that the elections commission has played in the process as it now exists and that's the appointment process
um i think there are clearly some things we have
control over in how we go through that selection process that we could attend
to uh regardless of what broader effort is
underway now i suppose it's possible that a broader effort would could include removing the elections
commission as an appointing authority in which case such an effort would be moot on our part but um there are as i see at
least those two different levels of consideration and um as of right now
discussing this document inviting and i mean we this was a publicly announced meeting we could hold
several more um to gather more input it's not clear to me
to what end we would be doing that so if we're framing it as a discovery process if we're framing it as
a recommendation process to some unknown body that might be making
putting forward a charter amendment all of that is up in the air um but i'm grateful to have the information i think
it i agree with commissioner dye that the department of elections and the
commission our ability to meet our obligations depends on a redistricting process that the people
of the county trust and that um we should play some role in
trying to improve the not just our part of it but the overall process if there
is such a path pathway to that
so i would say that the only pathway is a charter amendment because
you know we're kind of stuck with the existing charter and [Music]
i believe it reflects outdated practices that have as as i
mentioned have many other um bodies have improved on
where san francisco was when it established the redistributing task force back in i guess it was 2000 2001
somewhere in that time frame um so it would have to be a charter amendment
whether uh whether it is the elections commission itself or a member of the board of
supervisors or i am sure there are
possibly members of the public or advocacy organizations that are thinking about it
what i my intention was again was to have us as a body that's
very interested in the outcome being good that we have a thoughtful discussion
on what we think would work for san francisco uh i tried to put in a bunch of different
examples because uh you know having seen what people proposed in different states
and what is actually passed in certain states uh and what has been adopted by
different cities and counties in in in california uh
you know i think there are many ways to um you know crack this egg so
so i think it would be useful for us to to have this discussion uh
and like i said i am open to whatever this body decides on what
specific action we take whether we want to propose a charter amendment or whether we want to simply inform the
process of someone else proposing one so theoretically we have 10 years to fix
this but you know there's certainly momentum now uh the report like i said will be
finalized in the next couple of days um i'm not suggesting we do this in one
shot i i do think it would be useful to maybe have some presentations on
you know exactly you know what is in the current charter
uh it's very scant i will tell you i have looked at it it's very very
minimal um and i try to incorporate that in the san francisco column as best as i can
of what you know what is practice and what is actually what what is actually law
for example uh you know the first item about outreach
you know as far as i understood i mean it was in the voter information packet i think and it was on a couple of
websites and it was probably tweeted a few times but
this body only had 35 applicants as i understand it
we know there were only eight to the board of supervisors we do not know how many the mayor considered
as an example la county which has an independent citizens commission modeled after the
state crc had 741 that's just a difference right there
so we didn't have a lot to choose from it's all i'm saying right and part of the process was totally
opaque uh so you know so i think there are some very
obvious changes that ought to be suggested because the charter simply silent on it okay see
president bernhard says her hand up president bernhard's uh i have a question for the deputy city attorney
which is whether or not this commission is in a is has the authority to put forward a charter amendment
yes deputy city attorney florida is no no we do not
no you do not only the board of supervisors um can put
forth a charter amendment um within the city of course but we could suggest that a supervisor
carry it for example yes okay yeah this commission um may
draft a letter solution yes whatever is within um the boundaries
of what this commission can do um but but uh not a charter amendment um so
um and and i echo commissioner dye's um frustration at the scant um information
in the charter um and just so um to respond to uh um
commissioner shapiro's question um the the commission is is an independent um
sorry the task force is an independent um body so they're they basically don't um respond
to they don't have to respond to anyone except for the citizens of san francisco
um can i make one comment related to that in maybe um
attorney for us you could confirm but my understanding is that there was an instance in the past couple years where
the ethics commission worked with one of the supervisors to propose a ballot measure
is that correct or on campaign finance a commission may always work with a
supervisor um to bring forth a charter amendment but the the commission itself right um
you know can cannot um so um for the most part um
unless they have the authority under whatever subsection um enacted them um
unfortunately um for the elections commission you do not have that authority
yeah i mean my own opinion well with the discussion so far i i'm certainly open to
going down that path i think i think before we um go too much into the actual
substance of the document we might want to just get on the same page as to whether
it's something we want to pursue because i think it's going to take multiple meetings and
you know we we have the option of breaking out into beaupac if we wanted to to have a more
detailed because if we're going to be drafting a detailed document and
and some of this discovery but i'm open to that um i think as deputy city chart city attorney flores
mentioned we're of the three appointing authorities were unique in that we were kind of the more neutral
and we were in the middle of that process so we do have i think we have something to offer
in this process president burnholtz yeah i would like to build on that i
think again i think there's um that today we may be able to determine if this is something the
commission wants to pursue i do think there should be some thought to
uh whether we want to do it as a whole commission whether we want to use bopec whether and i wasn't here when the open
source voting task force was created whether or not it's something like a study group with intention
to create recommendations and i think that you know that that process is um is important because uh i
um i think public participation in the process is important and so we would
want to be as thoughtful as we can about how and when and
we're going to invite in um other parties to
help us think this through um but uh yeah so process and substance
uh rather than just jumping into the list of uh the information that commissioner dai has presented
i would be very much in favor of the elections commission um
creating a using bopeck for that purpose or creating a task force if that's what we needed or even saying you know we
will hold time at every meeting for the next six months or something to address this and
as you know bring in other outside experts and and whatnot but i think we want to have a have a plan
um to address this uh because of its criticality
can i can i ask commissioner do you do you personally have a sense of like
the timeline on this that you had in mind or well um
as far as as i know no one [Music] no one has approached me at least um
about you know putting forth the charter amendment and i know there's not enough time to to do
that in time for the to the next election but like i said theoretically there are 10 years to fix this and i
think it should be a thoughtful process there is certainly
a lot to be learned from all the other independent cities and counties
that have instituted variations on on the crc model
i'm you know open to taking whatever time we need to take if it
means breaking off into a task force to do it and inviting
knowledgeable speakers to educate us i and and the public because again i the
whole point of doing this is to have a public discussion and um collaborate to come up with the best
changes uh for the city and county of san francisco which is unique of course
okay mr shapiro yeah i i very much support this
plan i i'm torn about this timeline issue
because well yes technically there are 10 years before this
is becomes imminent um it's also i think important to ensure
that the communities that were most impacted by this experience are able to share their personal
experience as a part of the process and if we let it go too far i fear that could be
a challenge the other concern i want to not concern but consideration i want to
make sure is incorporated um whether it's a task force or we do it as a as a whole commission
is that we have very clear processes of
how we are documenting the information that we are gathering
because i think in order to provide something that or deliver something with integrity we
have to demonstrate integrity um and so i'd like to ensure that
whatever that that um process looks like there is a good amount of time spent
determining what the process will be um so that the public is very aware of
this because i think the goal from what it sounds like we're all saying is to strengthen this process and ensure that
the process is has significantly more integrity than where
we left it so um in order to do that i think we have to build build trust in that process from
the beginning that's that's my one ask so i i like the idea of
you know trying to do this like in i think it's timely i don't want to leave it to the 10th
year um uh you know i also don't want to limit it so
i think six months is probably a good time frame for us to you know bring in speakers for
for everyone to feel like they understand this chart and like i said i'm happy to share my
knowledge but there are many other people who have been working on this for decades and have
been tracking what's going on all over california and and can build on it so
like i said i tried to make this as comprehensive as i could but i don't claim that it's comprehensive
so i see a number of familiar names in the people watching online and i'm wondering if maybe if we open it up to
public comment maybe some people have some thoughts on on ways we can move forward
could inform our subsequent discussion today does that sound good with people
okay um secretary delgado if we could open it up to public comment on this item
first caller you are unmuted and you have three minutes to comment
can you hear me now yes yes oh okay david pilpell on the phone now walking around the house um so
i have a a lot that i could say on this topic to um summarize
this coming tuesday may 24th um i understand is the deadline
for introduction of charter amendments at the board of supervisors for consideration for this november of 2022
election i would be frankly highly surprised if there wasn't uh
at least one charter amendment introduced on tuesday relating to redistricting that either would alter
the process for 10 years from now or make the lines that were just recently adopted
only applicable to this november election and restart the the process um for the other
cycles in this 10-year period i believe there was so much contention so much unhappiness
with the process and the outcome that it just seems on switching phones
um secretary delgado
i'm sorry i apologize that's okay
did did was mr popo was he in the middle of he was in the middle of the sentence and
he was trying all right all right can you hear me now yeah yes oh yeah all right sorry the
the phone was dying so now i moved to the computer it's all crazy anyway um
there was so much contention with the process that i just think that there will be you know some uh political uh uh
fallout from that resulting in a charter amendment in the event that there is a charter amendment proposed next tuesday
i would encourage this commission to consider its views on the matter and actually adopt some recommendations
either from uh commissioner dye's chart or as a result of public comment or a
merger of all of that at your next meeting which will still be timely to inform the board of supervisors discussions um at the rules
committee uh during uh june and early july in the event that there is if i'm wrong
and there is no charter amendment introduced uh next week then i think you have more time and could have a more uh
deliberative process involving either
this commission's role or the larger design of how we do redistricting in the
city i absolutely agree that there is insufficient detail uh in the charter
and although sometimes leaving things to interpretation and good judgment by policymakers is the best approach
sometimes not having enough uh guardrails and guidelines um hit the three minutes i'm so sorry
okay i'm happy to share more in the future thanks thanks next
commenter next caller learn to warden you are unmuted and you have three
minutes hi this is lauren girardin with the league of women voters of san francisco
thank you so much for this conversation um for thinking so so much about
how to make redistricting better for the people of san francisco um and for for
reading our letter um i have to say this is one of the first letters we've gotten some response to so um it was a delight
to hear um uh you know those we we had specific recommendations in
the letter and there were many places where we said let's wait and see like you were we're
curious uh to see if there will be a charter amendment proposed we don't uh we are not part of anyone we don't know
of anything that's going forward um but uh as david pillpell said who knows
but you know with whatever steps uh the elections commission takes the league is
happy to help provide either any history on the task force um from this time
around we were at every meeting and have lots and lots of notes um and ideas um or uh you know
and also we can make recommendations for groups and people to talk to um you know
other folks that were in that letter of course and then other people and organizations we know um were were involved in this process
usually in part of the public and then there will also in the final report just to note there will also be
member statements um so the draft final report that came out is part of what will be in the um final final report um
the member statements shall also i expect shed some light on some of the processes so um look forward to that
and um yeah i guess so we'll be seeing you at future elections commission meetings
back on your schedule thanks so much okay thank you mr jurgen
we do have we do have one other caller on the line
mr hill you are unmuted thank you uh can you hear me all right
yes great so my name is stephen hill i've lived in san francisco for a few decades and i
was involved in the 1996 drafting of a proposition g that established district
elections in the redistricting process as well as proposition h which uh was for uh a ranked ballot proportional
system working with professor rich de leon at san francisco state who was the consultant to the elections task force
that uh sort of oversaw this entire process and so you know i think that there's um
at that time we were looking at uh some of it was uh what the city attorney's
advice was telling us of what we could and could not put into in terms of what a commission uh
could do and that some of that thinking has changed as commissioner dye has referred to so i i think it's a good
idea to reopen this and start looking at other ways the other things you can do however i would say that as someone who
observed the process some of what it went on it seems to me is just simply
the process kind of snuck up on people it comes every 10 years not enough people were paying close attention
um and suddenly it was upon them and you know you've you've made mention that you didn't have a lot of
uh people who applied um so those are the things that are probably the biggest
problem that needs to be looked into in terms of what you can do with the criteria and these other things there
aren't a whole lot of possibilities i would say um you know at the end of the day you are trying to work with what's
called a winner take all electoral system you know winner take all means
i win it when you lose and vice versa so you know some people are it's inherent
to the process of redistricting even when a commission or a task force does it that some people just aren't going to
be happy with the districts as they've been drawn so the thing i would encourage the uh
the commission to look into is really think more innovatively and
that would mean perhaps you don't use districts at all perhaps you start looking at other types of methods like
proportional representation in which you can have a ranked ballot system like you
already have with ranked choice voting instant runoff voting for single winner seats but instead you use multi-seat
districts and with proportion representation you actually can get the best of both worlds you can look at many
cities that have uses cambridge massachusetts cities and other countries and you can see that
you you can get neighborhood representation because you have candidates that will run strongly in neighborhoods but with a depending on
how you configure the system in san francisco you may only need 16 percent of a city-wide vote to win and so you
can get that 16 in certain neighborhoods or you can get it from a few different neighborhoods and other parts of the
city you get these sort of hybrid coalitions that form that could be a better system for a city like san
francisco oh i uh okay i didn't realize i'm timing
it myself and it says two minutes and 38 seconds i'm timing it here on a computer here in
in the room right thank you mr hill thank you thanks
i would explore more options that's my uh my advice to you
okay um any other public commenters i don't see anyone else online
okay um so i do think there's a question of how
broadly we want to look at it um we can uh i mean i did make a comment in
my document here that you know there are uh other election
reforms like multi-member districts that that you know improve democratic outcomes that's pretty well documented
in literature it's pretty much used in every other developed nation besides ours so um
so we we could start abroad and and look at that you know gerrymandering only happens
because of district lines the more district lines you have to draw the more opportunity for gerrymandering and the
more reason you need uh independent body to adjudicate that
so um so i don't know if the commission has the appetite to
you know to start broadly and then
uh and then also hone in on this issue because if you have any districts at all
even if they are multi-member you're still going to have the issue where the lines go
yeah i mean personally i think if there's a solution even if it's broader it's worth at least mentioning so um
i'll be in favor of of entertaining solutions of all kinds
um i did i did have a question in response to um what mr pilpel said and mr arden
to deputy city attorney flores um if it's true that
is it true that next tuesday is the deadline for the charter amendments for next november yes next tuesday is the
charter amendment deadline for november for this november election um i am at liberty to say that we have
not been asked to draft a charter amendment
uh and it is wednesday and um it will be nearly impossible to draft anything from
now until tuesday okay um so so um
there will 99.9 likely not be
a charter amendment uh for redistricting next tuesday okay and then and the one percent chance
that there is is there would there be an amendment period after that or or is it
done completely yeah it follows a normal process um it's just for introduction it has to be introduced
um you know um tuesday okay so it um you know it um
you guys probably aren't familiar um with the process but uh the drafting process begins with a
request and then the two you know the city attorney discusses with the requester
um what they'd like to see and it's an iterative process that goes back and forth we also have a team within our the city
attorney's office the legislative analysis division that we need to also check in with about charter about any
kind of um anything that has to do with legislation and so like i said um it is nearly
impossible to get that done and you know i i i it's it's not uh there's not enough time
for that at this point okay thank you right so um
so how do people feel in terms of um in terms of like the next meetings on
this do you should we just have another before the full commission
or do do we want to start [Music] breaking out into so my question is
does everybody want in on this or do you want to delegate it to a smaller group to study it i mean i think it's pretty
important to our overall mandate so
if i may i agree that it is important to our oral mandate i fear
that especially with the you know we have the election in june
and then we have elections in november and then there's going to be elections
again in the next i mean there's just a lot and so i think there is value in having a special
like i actually don't know the bullpec process um but a special subgroup that is
focused on it and that at the commission meetings can provide an update
um on on those findings or provide report in the 72 hours in advance
um that can take buy-in from the other commissioners um but i just
i feel that it requires more of a strategic plan than um
that i think we can provide in just this forum
yeah i i would echo that i think one concern i have is that if we did bring it before the full commission
there's the possibility that you know if we're gonna have large numbers of people i don't know if
that would be the case or not but it could kind of slow down a lot of other business items
we have it's pretty wonky i have to say so yeah that's true
um you know this is really about like organizational and process design
uh and i would foresee you know having some expert speakers to
weigh in on this and you know make the chart more complete and then uh really for the full commission to
to to debate some options and to you know make uh a set of um
recommendations that would then be incorporated into a charter amendment that we might ask the board of
supervisors to take on um or
uh or an advocacy group that you know wants to wants to carry it and put it on the
ballot so
so you you were um on the terms of a committee versus the full unit did you have a problem i don't
know i i personally think i kind of liked um
president bernhard's idea of you know setting aside time for the next several meetings um
you know and and you know have have an expert or agree to talk about certain things and you know
take it in some bite-sized pieces and do it over a process of of several months i
you know it kind of depends how engaged people want to be if if you want to delegate it
i'm sure we could find three people or four people to work on it but
yeah just commissionership here yeah i can i could um
support that i think i just want to make sure that perhaps there is some
leadership in terms of the process and the timeline um and what that looks like and also
just the criterion we're using you know what what how are we evaluating
things that are put in front of us what is our object what is our policy objective um and how are we going to evaluate the
different potential outcomes of those um of different alternatives that we could have i think we just need a framework
and so perhaps the there is um some leadership in regards to
just maybe structuring it so okay for the next two months we spend
time asking folks to come in and speak and then the two months after that it says just some leadership in terms of
and and collaboration in terms of what it looks like i don't feel that that needs to be taken through the whole
commission um but perhaps we could vote on it and get feedback from each other but i do think a plan
needs to be developed with clear um with clear goals
criterion and and an understanding of what we're actually working toward but i i'm fully
in agreement i think there's value i definitely would want to participate in all of the hearings
comments myself so i can imagine everyone else shares that too
and my other thought is we're kind of down a couple of members so it's not going to you know having a
a committee when we don't even have a full commission right now is i'm not sure if it makes sense to exclude anyone
yeah well i think really the main case where i i wouldn't want to
the only case where i would want to exclude someone is if maybe someone felt that they didn't have enough time to
to be involved and then and then the people that wanted to be involved would still be able to but um
um president bernholtz you have a comment how about a situation
i agree we are a small commission um but i also think that there are some
things that a smaller group would be more efficient at doing um i would suggest perhaps uh commissioner
dye if you're interested in doing so and maybe uh with some info from commissioner shapiro
come back to this body next meeting with a six-month
plan that would say and this is obviously just um making this up
you know for the next two months we'd suggest um open public hearings focused
on studying other options and familiarizing ourselves uh hearing from some experts
on what our best practices what considerations to put into place blah blah blah that's
obviously um takes a significant amount of time for the whole commission to do
but we'd make sure that you know the public was aware that this was happening to also let us know if
anyone else who else in the city might be thinking of moving something forward and
that at the three-month mark there would be a
sub-committee of the commission that would then say okay we've heard from these experts
here two or three recommendations for how the commission might go forward whether that's continuing the study
group whether it's drafting um one or two options in more detail
whether it's creating a you know a working group would by then there may be others in the city who have
stepped forward and said yes we want to carry this forward something like that and i'm the numbers here i'm making up i don't know
how many months worth of expertise we'd want to engage in i'm not so much concerned about
creating a small committee from an already small group i am concerned about three-hour meetings of the elections
commission where regular business doesn't get attended to um because we want to give this the
attention it needs it's important enough that it may well require an
addition you know additional time beyond regular elections commissions meaning so if the two of you or one of you were
willing to just take a stab at putting out a draft plan of action for moving
forward then we'd at least know when in the calendar we're going to address the kinds of questions that commissioner
shapiro was just raised such as by what criteria would we be balancing these different
recommendations and so on and so forth but we'd be able to get started we'd be able to
um serve the public's purpose by taking this on now and not putting it off we'd be able
to learn from anything else that's going on out there and we won't have tied ourselves down to a process that may
prove to have underestimated or overestimated the degree of effort this
would take to do it right okay does that seem like a reasonable
plan commissioner would you i'm gay and then commissioner shapiro if you've i owe you coffee anyway yes indeed okay so
that sounds like an excellent um excellent um approach then
so then you need to do you need a motion for that chris i don't think so it can just be informal and then so the
next meeting would be kind of more about process than in terms of discussing this
can i answer any questions um on the chart
i have a lot of questions and i imagine i can ask you separately and okay and yeah i have a
lot of questions all right um yeah and we we can talk about that offline then
uh i just wanted to see if there was anything else um that wasn't wasn't clear about this
chart that i could clarify for anyone um
or questions um you have on my comments
i i did read it i think i think you it's very good um but i'll save any detailed comments for another meeting i think
sounds good all right so um then let's move on to the next item
let me pull up the agenda here uh item number 11 director's report
discussion of possible action regarding the director's report so director arms yeah i can take any questions on this i
mean before you read through this so
i um do not have any questions commissioners is this specific to their
racial equity progress or is it just the other either one one component of the report
okay but are we able to ask about either yeah okay
i i do have a couple of questions um i wanted to ask
how the if there is a any transparency around some of the
details of so for example um
like there are um specific
just plug specific comments um priorities that are outlined and goals
around um like even belonging and equity and a couple of questions i have pertained to
how those are being measured and i don't mean like the the
method but how they're like how are you determining what is well and is it based solely on the
racial equity criterion that's provided from the city can you just walk me through that
process a little bit so we have a racial equity group and so so the group actually sets
the goals and the and the issues that they want to discuss and the progress they want to make in
whatever area that's why there's a lot of information here about self-improvement educational and the the
vocational training that's something that people said that that that they want to
around equity to improve their skill set so that's something we don't we don't set
goals necessarily around something like that so i if you have a question
well a lot of this is people are one we we've set the situation up so
people have the input on what goals to set and then we share those goals with everyone in the department so everyone
department can actually have input on the goals that the racial equity team has has put together
um and and now we've been focused mostly on our exterior goals as far as
um you know the outreach and then and providing information to the poll
workers now or more once we get to this election cycle you can start having more conversation
uh and goal setting around the internal uh issues but we haven't had time yet
because we've just run through all these different election cycles since last september so after the june elections
when these teams will start to meet and set the more internal goals versus the external goals we've already
been undertaking that that's actually very helpful because i was very curious about that it was like very tangible
that there were external there there was a divide between what was happening inside versus the external
um and i wanted to ask just a couple other questions about that especially pertaining to
the um like climate i mean are there specific
priorities around those goals that i know you mentioned is going to be kind of forthcoming
like actual climate of the organization because ultimately climate is what is a driver
of belonging and inclusion so um i wanted to understand how you're
measuring do you mean the the atmosphere inside the department or
climate change inside of the department employee climate that's where the
surveys come in yeah yeah so so the surveys and then in the surveys they're not just a one-and-done
uh they're not the one the surveys that we've already have issued and and uh and uh gathered information
they'll continue and also we're going to start to imp to include the temporary needed employees so so far the a lot of
the information well some of the surveys were with people who were applying to the departments they weren't even employees yet so they were
giving us feedback on the actual process how they were engaging with the department how they before they and
someone someone never even entered the department they never didn't get positions and so we got we had we
collected the information on the on the process prior to coming into the department uh we've also have
information from from from surveys people are already in the department and get a sense of what they think as far as
the climate is concerned but now we're also going to be including uh the temporary native folks before they are
separated some are actually going to try to keep on board and not separate them so they can actually contribute
to the racial equity team's work and that's also something that would
contribute to the climate of the department so we're trying to we're trying to have every give as many people
the opportunity to provide input as possible so we could take that information and then set goals and then
then go from there yeah okay um i think i i guess one last follow-up on that is
just how that is um communicated back
and how decisions are made on behalf like organizationally on behalf of um
so i don't know if that's kind of forthcoming uh based on those surveys but it was
something that i was left curious about so the so the work that that their racial their
asian equity team does actually share with the entire department so when when they're bringing information like from these surveys or
if they if they meet on something and then they make a decision that's shared with also the
the the status and the outcomes of their meetings that share with everyone the department so that that's how we keep people in the
know um and then people can can comment um i mean also i don't know if it's which
would we also have like a uh we call it uh suggestion boxes anonymous
suggestion boxes so people don't want to engage with with us whether we know who they are they can still
contribute their you know their their perspective anonymously to these these
suggestion boxes that we have both in the department and at the warehouse um but really it's it's it's
everyone the information is here with everybody that's and so if there's an issue with climate that we're addressing specifically
that's something that the racial equity team would take up and whatever uh whatever information they they put
together whatever process they plan to undertake uh whatever goals they they
set that's something i'd be sharing with everyone in the department and they could also everyone department could also get feedback back to the team
okay okay you wanna want commissioner
yeah so um so thanks for for uh the plan i know that we were actually
tardy providing our part and actually the questions that i have uh
maybe it's president bernholds could better address it um under the item boards and commission
it was fairly spare um like item b says the commission has a number of items remaining from 2021 that
will be carried into 2022. i'm just curious what those are
so if director arms if you have the answer great if not maybe president bernhard's going to page address it
this is on page 14 okay i think this is us right
um i'm uh afraid i'd have to review that in more detail and get back to you
commissioner die i don't have that information with me at this point okay
yeah i don't know how much control we have because we don't control who appoints us and so i think we're
actually making sure you guys are doing a good job it's probably mostly what we
can do but there's you know a mention of a land acknowledgement and then it just says that it was
recommended to pause and i i don't know what happened with that just yeah i can i can fill in that
information but i mean i can tell you right now what
happened please please i'm just curious because i don't you know it just doesn't there's just not a lot of
details i don't know what yeah they so the land acknowledgement was brought up
uh and um not voted on but discussed at
two if not three meetings there were certain members of the commission who were hesitant to
um there were some members of the commission who were eager to adopt what
was put forward to us which was something which was drafted from the deputy city attorneys based on
another city commission uh there were members of the commission who were also hesitant to
um pursue it we uh commissioner then commissioner jung and i uh
undertook some independent research and called both representatives of native american
advocacy groups in the city who had been working on this with the city's
the human rights commission excuse me and some scholars at stanford and elsewhere gathered some
information about um feelings about land acknowledgements the
appropriateness of them pluses and minuses and as we were in the midst of that process we were actually um
approached by a native american group in the city that
had been leading the effort or had been involved in the effort to have commissions do this and said that they
themselves were pausing the effort to get commissions to do this
because they were re uh considering the the land acknowledgement that they'd put
forth to people um and at that point it was tabled and not picked up again got it
i don't know if this was a consideration that was to that was a part of that process but um my understanding is that
land acknowledgements at this point should be incorporating an element of um
there's a trust that you can pay into and therefore if you're just sim stating the land acknowledgement it
isn't actually repairing harm and so i don't know if there was some consideration from the city
attorney's office and incorporating that uh that line in the land acknowledgement but i think would be
helpful to understand where the what the specifics were um because i too
think it's important uh so i i can't speak to the deputy city attorney to the city attorney's office
part of that i can say that i think some of that was why the uh group we were in contact with that we
had invited to come speak to us asked to put the the effort on hold at the time there was
also concern i can say expressed by the commission um about some of the language in the land acknowledgement that
actually um that in recognizing the sovereignty of the remain to shalony
was that in fact in some way calling into question
the sovereignty of the city and county government um and i don't know where that was left
um but that was that was a concern that was expressed uh repeatedly uh
during the commission's discussions of it do you mind if i go from your question
about the commission yeah you know actually i i have a suggestion it is getting late
and maybe um because this is more the director's report we could if we want to talk about
racial equity for the commission we could maybe do that on its own item do you think or
okay um but um
if uh are there other questions about the
information that the director provided looks like good management i mean a lot
of it's just good management i think okay um let's open it up to public
comments i we do have one caller okay
caller you are in widget and you have three minutes uh i'm assuming you can hear me now
i i keep alternating between the phone and the computer david pilpal again um so just two items uh related to the
director's report uh as usual comprehensive lots going on
i just wanted to confirm that the not only
did san francisco's new uh redistricting map get adopted and i presume precincted and incorporated for
november but i believe that the new bart districts were also communicated and i
hope that those have also been incorporated in precincting precincted and i'm wondering if there's
a preliminary assessment for how many uh precincts result for the november
election i have not had a chance to ask that of director arndt perhaps one
of you could direct that question or i will follow up with him separately and also another question perhaps for
director arts i understand there's been concern at other city departments about the impact of the relatively new
behested payments legislation enacted by the board of supervisors that it had
some direct and intended consequences and that it also had some indirect and
unclear if they were intended or unintended consequences in the part of the director's report
that discussed outreach and the community-based organizations on page
3 in the middle that responded to the 2022 rfp
the six local non-profit organizations plus the prior four for a total of ten i'm just wondering if the department has
experienced any issues either with those uh grantees or with any other aspect of
the behested payments legislation as particularly relates to
consultants contractors and sub-consultants and subcontractors because apparently this uh bs depayments legislation
changes what city departments can do and can't do relative to asking folks or suggesting
or directing that work by consultants or contractors be done in a certain way or
by certain individuals or groups i'm just wondering perhaps one of you wants to direct that question otherwise again i will follow
up with the director separately thanks for listening
okay and there anyone else thank you mr popo
okay um so commissioners any remaining comments it sounds like there is interest in discussing the racial equity
at a future meeting we could we could do that okay um so
before we move to the next item i was advised by deputy city tor attorney flores that um we should skip back to
number nine the dominion voting systems contract extension just to allow public comment on that on that
item but not to um for the commission to discuss it so on item number nine
secretary delgado can you um open it up to public comment uh sure there aren't any hands raised
though okay let's just um just want to give a few more seconds
oh there we go we have one hand caller you are unmuted and you have three minutes to comment
can you hear me right now yes we can hear you okay sorry once again i switched um
thank you for reopening this i think in the future when you have an intention to
continue an item it's fine to state that intention um
but then open for public comment and following public comment to take whatever action to postpone or uh
dispose of an item i'm also not sure if president bernhard has walked away if you've lost the forum
temporarily i'm not i haven't gone anywhere okay i'm sorry that's one of the challenges of having not enough
cameras and whatnot i wasn't suggesting anything on tour all right thanks for listening happy to have this item be
continued to a future meeting thank you okay thank you mr pillpow okay anyone else
no we don't have any other client any other hands raised okay um then moving on to item number 12 commissioner's
12. Commissioners’ Reports
reports discussion and possible action on commissioner's reports on topics not covered by another item on this agenda
someone raised her hand oh um oh you put it down that's okay
so what's any it would pop up and then it would go
down so i'm guessing that they decided not to come did president bernholtz were you did you have your hand raised for a second there
yes uh for the commissioner's reports but if you're still on public comment oh
well i was just going to mention um and we have two packet items which were letters from um but yes uh president
bernie's if you'd like to begin uh thanks commissioner gerdonic so i have two uh things to report one is uh
there i believe there is a packet item regarding some emails from the aclu
national aclu regarding a voting rights case in alabama i was the conduit to
bring that to director arts and i believe there's some background materials that have been
um included in the packet essentially the aclu and the voters write foundation
and with support from morrison enforced our law firm are seeking um
support from local election officials for a lawsuit they are bringing in the state of alabama about the redistricting
process i'm not sure that there was there was a letter from the
northern california esclu but it was on a different topic yes oh okay i i thought the um
my mistake i thought that that so anyway i was the conduit to connect the national aclu
to the department and they are considering that request and i don't know the status of it i was simply the
conduit the second thing i wanted to report was that due to some long-standing or some
recently acquired health issues related to long covid um my health has been failing and
it's the reason for my remote participation in these meetings and also the reason
we've needed someone else to lead meetings because of the
rule against a president leading a meeting if she is participating remotely but given the
current medical information that i've been receiving i am going to have to
submit my resignation as president i cannot carry the um the extra work that it is required to
serve as president it's um with great regret that i that i do this particularly in the middle of a year
um i've it's been an honor to serve as president and um i'm honored to be able to i hope continue on the commission but
i will no longer be able to serve as president until there's some significant changes in my health
so um i believe that means we will have to have um an uh
officer election at the next meeting and i want to thank everyone who's been so
uh helpful in allowing me to continue to participate okay thank you president bernhardt we
all hope you recover soon and quickly and we all are very appreciative of the work you've
done this past year and a half to this point so thank you
um other commissioners
okay i do not have anything report either let's open it up to public comment
okay we do have one caller on the line caller you are unmuted and you have three minutes to comment
uh david pilpel again things are moving very quickly it's hard
to keep track so i think i recall from the beginning of the meeting that commissioner jung
resigned it might be worth acknowledging uh his uh tenure and contributions to the
commission at uh the next meeting of the the body uh i
will you know make uh comments at that point but i also want to take a moment now to appreciate president bernholds
and all that she's done uh the the past nearly six months as
president wish her the best in terms of her health and hope that she will continue to be a
member and participate in the commission meetings as best she can perhaps we could also finally
get a member appointed by the school board since they seem to have gotten through
their situation um but there's there's a lot of coming and going and that's
just at your meetings and i'm sure behind the scenes uh uh the commission
secretary and the director and the the admin and i.t staff uh have their hands
full so i i'm not sure how best to crystallize both the frustration i had
at the beginning of the meeting my deep appreciation for all of you and your service and the just continuing
difficulties that we're all having with covet in the state of the world and participating in however we can to to
try to keep our you know fragile democracy together it it seems like it's
you know just a theoretical issue but i think it's very real and very practical and and i appreciate all of you for all
the the work that you do here i hope those comments are relatively on point thanks
again for listening okay thank you mr pilfer
we have no other callers raising their hands you said no other
callers or okay all right then let's move on to item number 13 meeting policy discussion and possible action regarding
a potential commission policy on holding regular meetings including circumstances for cancelling or postponing meetings
and providing as much as pos as much advance notes to the public as possible so this is an item that commissioner dai
you had requested so turn this over to you thank you um
i think just because of uh the number of special meetings that we've had recently
and uh also um [Music] uh since there there might have been
some question about whether the last meeting uh needed to be held or not we didn't actually have a discussion about it
um i wonder if we need to set a policy
whether it be informal or something that we codify in the bylaws
i would suggest a couple of things one is that you know we try to meet monthly
and we try to maximize attendance um
you know it seems like we've struggled to to have quorum that's partially due to not having a complete commission but
you know we we get into tight situations like this when somebody has to be out for any reason and we're barely making
quorum and it's not optimal and so my question is
can we have a policy that we check in at the end of each meeting and see if our regulating schedule meeting is still
going to work and if we you know moved it by a week up by week or delayed by week could we
actually get more commissioners to attend that's one thought i had
um and then if we're going to same thing at that point consider
whether we're going to cancel the meeting and discuss that you know kind of at the
end of each meeting just so that we are you know clearly um telegraphing to the
public uh you know when we are planning to cancel a meeting uh it's useful for the rest of
us too as commissioners and i'm sure for director arts to know if we're going to be doing that
um and the other issue is something that's already been brought up by multiple members of the public which is uh we are
not posting things quickly enough um
it's a challenge for us our packet this time is i don't know how many hundreds of pages
um you know when i was on the crc we had a 14-day notice requirement so
we had to get our our act together to make sure we had things posted well
in advance um it also gave us that much time to review
things i personally find the 72 hour last minute posting very very challenging
i spent hours trying to read through everything
and enough that i could have thoughtful comments so sometimes i can barely get through it and then i haven't had time
to absorb it because you know it was just posted or even if it was posted 72 hours in advance i
haven't had the time to read it so i would like us to adopt a policy where
if we have attachments especially if they're going to be you know 25 50 pages
long and it's ready let's not wait till 72 hours before the
meeting let's post it i mean let's post it as soon as we have it like i know for a fact for example this this vsap thing
which was quite it's quite lengthy that was done in 2021 that could have
been posted a month ago you know and i would have had time to like you know read it
you know when i had time to read it and absorb it and think about it and have intelligent insightful comments
you know so we could have good discussions at these meetings so i uh as a commissioner am
you know struggling to keep up and to provide meaningful input
i mean it's it's really tough with 72 hours so now i recognize they're going to be some
things that are probably going to be produced just in time and i would like to leave those 72 hours to look at those things but everything else if we know
we're going to talk about it put a draft agenda up knowing that we can change it 72 hours
in advance and put as many you know attachments and post those for the public and for
the commissioners in advance as possible so that we can better prepare for these meetings
so like i said it's a challenge for me as a commissioner and it's certainly a challenge for the members of the public
and if we want to be an open and transparent body i think that we need to do better
so that's the reason i asked for this to be put on the agenda
okay thank you commissioner dye any comments
thank you for bringing this up i also struggle with the short window
um i probably prefer
to have a clear like window rather than it being just when
things are available posting them because then we're just constantly going back and checking but if it were a week
you know i i too find myself disorganized with my questions because
i was rushing to try and make sure i read through everything and that doesn't make me as effective
and i know that for sure um so i really appreciate you raising that i would potentially
um i would propose maybe a week ahead of the meeting and anything inside of the week
i i just i don't know if i can always commit to being able to read it and read thoroughly i have very slow reading
comprehension i always have um and i have to read thoroughly
so that is my second thought suggestion i also think it's completely fair at the
end of each meeting just to remind ourselves what the date of the next meeting is and if there might be concerns but also
understanding that people have lives work families um and that i think we should
be understanding and flexible to that too
yeah i'm certainly um can agree to a lot of what was said i
i would support um you know if you wanted to adopt some kind of a policy like that i do think that um it helps it would
help for us to um [Music] make this a conscious policy because then
you know everyone is on the same page in terms of when things have to get done and and so on
um i think there's a little bit um you know a few deep more of the
details that we'd want to um understand though like
like commission or deputy city attorney flores like are we allowed to post documents
that the commission might be interested in even before an agenda is prepared like is that
could we have a section on our website where we post documents
like you know like this vsab document for example maybe before an agenda is prepared
um i'd have to actually do a little more research on that um but i think
um the public would probably struggle with
contacts if you post things before an agenda is actually finalized
um so it it probably would not help the public to have these random
attachments on the website without an agenda to actually conclude what what's going to be
discussed and why they're important yeah if i may that's why i suggested a draft agenda and actually what we did on
the crc just because 14 days is really long advanced notice we actually published a
standing agenda and basically said every meeting this is what our agenda is basically going to look like and then we
uh you know 14 days in advance would make it more specific um and that way they were categories so
you know for example for the next six months we may be talking about redistricting and so we have an item the
exact wording may not be right but we know we're going to be talking about it and if i make sure
i believe that this commission does have a standing type of agenda um there are
several items on your agenda that are considered monthly um and so
that could be your shell like um direct the director's report a commissioner's report
um that could be your shell um so people know automatically um but
yeah it's it's tough because you all are volunteers right and you all have lives
and families and professions and so i think um
that's a policy decision you'll all have to make about the deadline and if you want to go
further than the 72 hours yeah and we also have to be
um you know respectful over secretary she's had a limited time
and i think we want to be careful if not whatever change we do adopt doesn't just
result in a net increase in the number of things that need to be done but um
so in terms of this item um i know posting things earlier was just
one part of it but did you um
did you want to just kind of propose did you want to write something down or did you just yeah so i would
like us to as a you know regular check-in at the end of every meeting look forward to the
next meeting see who you know will be able to attend as far as we know knowing that people
have lives things change at the last minute fine but you know with all information available at this
time you know will we have quorum at the next meeting you know um
would you know shifting the meeting you know to whatever improve our
attendance especially since we are you know a small commission at the moment
um you know people are amenable to that
and then we post it and that way every the public has events notice we have events notice and
hopefully more availability as a group and less concern that we may not have quorum at the last minute
i mean i think that's a fairly straightforward thing to implement
um okay may i ask a question sure um
is there and that and perhaps if it's okay i'll probably i'll ask it to you um
all right sound really well well i think my question is can we work toward a week
so this is going back to the other like this is an alternative to posting things as they come
would it be more work on you to have the agenda and whomever will assume the new
president um office position and to have to have it be rather than 72
hours be a week and that way we all have more time
i don't that decision is not my choice i know that there are
um like sunshine like different types of information that comes that is is
gleaned from different um regulations
and yes we can make a you know like a standard um agenda like which was discussed already
and with regard to uh the meetings the meetings are the third wednesday of
every month it's if you look at the history they're pretty much standard except when there's
something special going on and the um
i guess it wouldn't matter about putting the items up on
on in the website except that the numbers are going to change later
with regards to the items depending on what else is added to the agenda later so there might be confusion there for
members of the public but if you i don't know if you just number them all the same and just add everything to the
bottom of it then i can see that working i think i think my question is more just
is there are there any and perhaps this is to the city attorney i i'm more so just
asking if we could change the formalized finalized agenda a
week before the meeting rather than 72 hours before the meeting
thank you for your question commissioner shapiro um you the commission can do whatever it
wants to do the requirement is posting an agenda 72 hours beforehand so we
could technically do a week ahead of time and we could just have that be the norm so we have the third
the third wednesday of the month that's a meeting and the wednesday before that is when the
final agenda unless extenuating circumstances yes
you can do whatever you want um my suggestion is in the interest of time and in the interest of
uh you don't have a current president uh i i suggest that maybe the
each individual commissioner can take this um information and consider um suggestions
uh and bringing them forth at the next meeting where um hopefully you'll be voting on a
president um and so um just yeah i think this is a great first step
um but i i you know i don't think that we may get to solving this uh tonight
so i can't i can't you don't want me to motion it until we have a present no you can you can do whatever you want
okay yeah i i mean we can't we can always yeah we can always exceed the
requirements so there's you know we can choose to exceed it so that's not a problem and
and like i said we're not meeting the minimum requirements now that's why we keep having to defer things because things are not getting posted even 72
hours in advance so i'd like to make a motion that we have our new deadline be a final
agenda with the the attachments one week prior to
the actual meeting um should we say target
if i may and maybe a friendly amendment sometimes there are maybe emergency situations that come up um where you
have to hear something with four days and you know like you're still within your agenda time but which is why i said
target yeah yeah so i would say a week ahead of time is the target is
well actually i was going to say is the deadline unless there are extenuating emergency circumstances
well so i have a question um
like what if it's what if like a commissioner has a document they want to add to the packet
but it's it's more just more information but it's not like an emergency i think that's fine okay
and then um okay yeah um
that's that's why i when you say it's a deadline it sounds
absolute and and [Music] you know if it's not an emergency we legally have 72 hours in advance so i
don't want to cut off that option but i do want to make it the new norm so i agree with you on that
so okay so we can we can table this until the next meeting
if we want that's fine in the interest of time i mean i think i think how about this like how about for
the next meeting we could just make an effort to meet that week just
insofar as i'm involved in posting things i can help to make sure that and whoever's putting the agenda together we
could just make sure they know try to aim for a week and then at least we won't be
we'll get the benefit at least for one month you know and try it out okay
and do we want to check in on the next meeting um
just one more suggestion i thought of how about if everyone lets me know if you're not going to make it to the
meeting because i do check you know like the week before are you going to make it but like like uh becca she let us know
you know prior advanced notice that she wasn't going to make it so that might be another way to track
thank you okay um
all right well so third wednesday is the 15th of june
anyone have an issue with that date so you're just talking about this one meeting next meeting my point is at the end of every meeting
let's just check in with everyone that as far as we know if anyone has an issue with that they
you know let's just state it and and if it looks like we might be risking quorum we can consider moving it
yeah i mean we could do that we could do that at the end of today's meeting but um did you want to on the policy issue
did you wanna i don't know does it need to be that formal can we just check in at the end of every meeting yeah i think we can uh
yeah okay um so
so um let's open it up to public comment in this item
i don't see any hands raised right someone just raised their hand here we go caller you're muted you have
three minutes to comment great david pilpell again um so i would
suggest a couple of things i'm not sure that you need a formal policy or an amendment to the bylaws i think you can
just sort of um do this and i think item uh 14 which is a currently a standing
item discussion possible action regarding items for future agendas you could either reword that or use that
as the opportunity to just check in and see what's happening that also might be a place where you could park items
that or or recap what's been discussed during the meeting so you know next month you
talked about having an election of officers and the dominion contract extension item and
the there there could be something further on open source blah blah blah having a place there both on the printed
agenda if you know that there are things that are coming up in the next uh few months um
and and just sort of you know doing a check-in as to where things are at i don't know that that requires a vote or
a change in policy or an amendment i think you just do it i think that's enough there i do like the idea of
trying uh a week in advance so for example if you say that if you
want an agenda item you've got to request that like by monday nine days
before the meeting with whatever documents you want to submit or a write-up or a draft reso
by you know monday or tuesday and then you're going to try to post things and
have you know a hopefully final agenda by wednesday seven days uh before and if
there is a need for a late item or some change that you can still do that up to 72 hours before but it is your intention
to have the the packet together by wednesday seven days before the meeting that's a
good intention that's a great thing for everyone concerned i would try that for next month see how it goes
and then you know you can always change that in the future that's my suggestion i think these are
great ideas and i appreciate it and i think i'm at least getting tired i don't know
about the rest of you thanks for listening okay thank you mr piltel
okay so we can revisit this at the next meeting um people are okay with the more informal okay
all right so let's move on to item number 14 discussion and possible action regarding items for future agendas
so we have the election of officers next month we have redistricting redistricting plan
uh charter amendment yeah plan for process planning for that
we incorporate the racial equity topic as a separate item
um yes i thought that you had proposed that yeah okay let's we could do that the
progress report um
and then we had deferred a bunch of things so the commission annual report will be [Music]
yeah commission annual report the dominion voting system saying we'll be back
there was an item that i wanted to discuss that's a new item and that is um
i learned a few months ago and i i didn't bring it up at the last month the last meeting because it was
for reasons of time but um i learned from director aaron said there was a
sole source contract that was agreed to by the department last fall
that i wanted the chance to discuss um
you know just in public because it was something that i don't think we had really had a chance to learn about
[Music] so just like an agenda item about
sole source contracts that the department has [Music]
signed um
and then are there any other new items that people have
okay um president bernhard's okay so let's take it up to public
comment i don't see any hands raised
okay then um oh and then commissioner wanted to
check in on people's availability next month june 15th everyone planning to be there yeah i can
attend everyone okay so then that means we're gonna stick with we'll stick with it we'll stick with
that meaning okay um well great that was a very long meeting
today um thank you everyone for sticking it out and the time is now
9 48 p.m have a wonderful night this meeting is adjourned
thank you for sharing