Elections Commission Regular Meeting

1. Call to Order & Roll Call

welcome to the june 15 2022 regular meeting of the san francisco elections

commission this meeting is being held in person at city hall room 408

1 dr carlton b goodlett place san francisco california 94102

as authorized by california government code section 54953e

and mayor breed's 45th supplement to her february 25th 2020 emergency

proclamation it is possible that some members of the elections commission may attend this meeting remotely

in that event those members will participate in vote by video members of the public may attend the

meeting to observe and provide public comment at the physical meeting location listed above or online

instructions for providing public comment are on the agenda in addition to participating in real

time interested persons are encouraged to participate in this meeting by submitting public comment in writing by

12 p.m on june 15 2022 to martha delgadillo at sfgov.org

secretary delgadillo uh can you explain some procedures for today's remote and

and in person meeting please okay thank you vice president chapel the minister of this meeting will reflect that this

meeting is being held in person at city hall room 408 one dr carlton b goodlatte place san

francisco california 94102 it is possible that some members

of the elections commission may attend this meeting remotely in addition to participating in real time interested

persons are encouraged to participate in this meeting by submitting public comment and writing by 12 pm on june 15

2022 to martha del video passive dot org

it will be shared with the commission after this meeting has concluded that will be included as part of the official

meeting file so the comment will be available on each item on this agenda each member of the

public will be allowed three minutes to speak comments or opportunities to speak

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page 5 of the agenda thank you vice president champion great uh with that i'll call the meeting

to order uh secretary delgado can you please proceed with the roll call sure

vice president chapel here commissioner bernholds your

commissioner guy here commissioner dragonic here

president okay what's like is uh president we have the metform wonderful

all right uh before we get started thank you to commissioner jerdonek for filling in and sharing the last meeting uh

commissioner bernholtz thanks for joining remotely i have eyes on you so if you need anything just let me know

2. General Public Comment

okay we'll start with the second agenda item general public comment public comment on any issue within the election

commission's general jurisdiction that is not covered by another item on this agenda

i will start with those in attendance in person and then move on to those attending remotely you'll have three

minutes please state your name at the start

do i need to turn that mic on is it on it's fine great okay thank you

all right thank you very much hello commissioners good evening my name is brent turner i was uh

a volunteer uh communications director for open voting

consortium starting back in 2005 uh around the time that this open source

issue became uh first came in front of the commission and and the county um i wanted to make a

comment uh at the last meeting uh commissioner bernholtz uh with all due

respect made a statement uh casting what we call in the software community some

fear uncertainty and doubt regarding open source software environments

i put in a note to the package that references the comment but the comment

may be not may not be clear at the risk of paraphrasing ice i i think the

commissioner mentioned that basically if an open source system was created

it is possible that people wouldn't show up to actually look at the code and therefore there may be a question as to

the realities of the open source community we just as the public representing the open source community

we want to just highlight that statement and make sure that it's addressed directly

that line is what we call a throwaway line that's been part of the microsoft

statement toward open source um you remember years back you might have heard that bill

gates accused the open source community of being communists um well another line

is that open source is no panacea if you ever hear anybody say that that is certainly true as very few remedies are

complete panaceas so that's what we call a throwaway line and this one as well

casting aspersion regarding a possible lack of engagement by the open source

community i just wanted to bring that to your attention uh this

this commission has been great for years leading the country the state the country on this issue and we want to

make sure that we stand strong and and don't have any misinformation entering

the picture or at least as as little misinformation as possible so thank you for your

uh time bernholtz thank you uh vice president chapel i'd

like to respond to that um it's a legitimate question i don't appreciate the uh

aspersions being of of association that are contained in that comment it's not a

question or a comment raised by any affiliation i have none with microsoft corporation or

any such others and it's a well-known fact that open source software uh many parts of open source software are

solely dependent on the volunteer efforts of of well-intentioned very diligent

sustainers and maintainers who work very hard it's also very true that the governance

of open source software is as important as the code itself so i'm not speaking on anyone else's behalf i'm simply

raising a question and i think it's behooves this commission to be sure that both

decisions about code are made in line with the

commission's policy to pursue open source software but to never ever uh

pretend that open source software is a silver bullet it's not a panacea and it must be uh

paid uh great attention to the governance of that software and to in fact make sure that people do

uh take the opportunity to review the code and maintain the code and to raise that question is to simply do my job it

is not to affiliate myself with any organization or any others who may have

somehow earned mr turner's disregard

it is a legitimate question being asked with legitimate concern for the uh free

fair and functional elections of the commission and i don't appreciate any other uh allegations or um hints thank

you thank you commissioner bernholtz i don't see any other public commenters in the

room so martha can you please move on to those um attending remotely sure

can you hear me now yes we can hear you great david pillpowell i have no general

public comment just a technical issue i could hear the commissioners including commissioner bernholds on

uh webex i could not hear uh martha so if artha could pull her

microphone over and be sure that the mic is on so that it's all uh piping through

the audio that would be great and it was very important stuff and i wanted to hear it so anyway

that that's all for now you'll hear from me more later thanks can you hear me david i can

okay thank you all right thank you okay bye

next caller oh mr rothman i'm going to unmute you you will have three minutes to comment

okay thank you my name is richard rothman and this might be a little outside your

well i'm going to propose it anyway you know it was in reference to proposition

c on the ballot that supervisor peskin uh since we seem to be in the recall

mode now for and how do the replacements and i don't

think the mayor should do the replacements and i was thinking since the the commissioners are each appointed

separately by an elected official the same as the ethics commission that maybe

either your commission or the ethics commission could interview in and appoint a

replacement in this way it would be seem more fair since each of you represent a

different elected official and it's too late to put it on the ballot now but uh it's just something to

think about um you know the people who were against c were uh very adamant that

they wanted uh the person could run again for uh the office and if you want

to do that fine but i just think we need a more uh simpler and fair way to

to appoint a person whose recall and if you want them to run

again you can say that or not but it's something to think about and thank

you for letting me speak

thank you we have no other callers with their hands raised okay

3. Discussion and Possible Action on Resolution on Continuation of Remote Elections Commission Meetings

great uh then we will move on to agenda item number three

discussion and possible action on resolution on continuation of remote elections commission meetings

uh the resolution is in the packet i'm not going to re-read it at this meeting

can i have a motion from someone on the commission

i move that we approve the motion in the packet second second wonderful

okay i think okay we go to public comment yes yes

there's no one in person anyone on the phone no i don't see any hatreds okay let's

take them out okay so uh vice president chapel how do you

vote yes commissioner bernholds yes commissioner die aye commissioner

jordan yes and commissioner shapiro yes okay with five votes in the affirmative

passes wonderful okay

4. Election of Commission Executive Officers

moving on to agenda item number four election of commission executive

officers discussion and possible action to elect a commission president and vice

president if needed for article five of the commission bylaws her the bylaws the

terms shall begin immediately at the conclusion of the meeting uh first let me say thank you to

commissioner bernholtz for her year and a half of service and leadership as as former president

uh your guidance has been instrumental uh personally and to the commission

the procedure is set out in the agenda i'm going to open nominations for president now

anyone who wishes to nominate a candidate or nominate themselves can state their name

i will start by saying that i am more than happy to serve as president

um so anyone else would like a stab in it throw your name out into the ring

no i nominate you okay um

and and note for the public's information that we don't have succession written into our bylaws so

that's right so there is no automatic ascension ascension

okay um anna do we take do we take public comment or just we need a second i think

oh do we need a second oh okay second a second okay

should we do for vice president now and then public comment or should we do it individually

do it together okay okay cool um so then similarly

do we have any nominations for vice president

but we should do the vote for president christie i think

oh were you saying that we do public comment together or we saying we do the vote together

so we can do nominations for vp then take public comment then do those two separate votes okay

okay uh so any nominations or self nominations for vice

president i nominate commissioner jurdonek for vice president

and are you willing to serve um thank you sure i'll serve thank you commissioner

day and i would also nominate commissioner shapiro if she would be interested

yes okay so we have two

um okay so then we will take public comment on both uh

president and vice president and then we'll move on to votes

okay i think we have a commenter in person

hello commissioners brent turner um supporting um the both nominations of uh

uh i believe commissioner chapel and commissioner gerdonic thank you

and no further commenters in person so martha if you can move on to those attending remotely

okay so we do have one caller with their hand raised i will unmute you caller and you have three minutes to comment

can you hear me now yes okay david bill fell again i moved over

to the computer this time um so when the question was put about the procedure and

dca flores alpine i could not hear her comment so when she has something to say

you got to share the microphone please please please um i certainly uh support

the the divided question here on on vice president chapel and i'm sure she'll do

a fine job uh and i'm choosing not to weigh in on um

the the vice president uh candidates both the commissioners here donating shapiro either way would do a fine job

anyone who's willing to put in the time at this point to try to you know keep the ship afloat uh is fine by me so

um thank you for listening bye later thank you mr popo

we don't have anything for you okay uh thank you

so first we'll do the vote for president so uh since there's only one you'll just

say i guess yes or no so martha can you take the vote please so

just to be clear we're voting for president now or for myself

how do you vote yes okay commissioner bernholds yes

commissioner dye yes commissioner jerdonek yes and

commissioner shapiro yes okay with five votes in the affirmative it passes the motion passes

okay now for vice president uh your vote will be for either uh commissioner

gerdonic or commissioner shapiro and if someone has four votes they will be

elected if not we will do another vote

okay martha can you do another pass

yes so now you'll ask us will each vote oh okay i see okay so vice president chapel you vote for uh

commissioner jordan or commissioner shapiro commissioner shapiro and uh commissioner bernholes

commissioner shapiro commissioner dai

commissioner jordanic commissioner jedonik

um commissioner and commissioner shapiro

commissioner shapiro okay so with three performances for commissioner shapiro

okay no though and two pretty commissioner all we have to do

so this is dca florida's the bylaws do call for is there an echo

the bible the commission's bylaws call for a majority vote um so a majority

vote would be four right so we

we need four total votes no one neither of the two neither of the two votes so

we can talk and then yes we'll take a re-vote yes okay

so commissioner jedonik your your history of service with the

commission is is well documented and exemplary my reasoning for voting for commissioner

shapiro was simply because you're getting close to the end of your term and i thought it would be helpful to have someone who could potentially do

multiple years since it's typically a multi-year kind of role so that was my thinking

i don't know if anyone else wants to provide any thought kind of any reasoning behind their votes

so my reasoning was actually to go with experience because i believe um the terms are actually one year if i recall

they're one-year terms yeah practice has typically been kind of two years but at

least while i've been on here and kind of what i was told going into it so as someone who's come from a very public

commission that rotated leadership um you know i i see no reason why we have

to make the term longer than a year it's a one-year term according to our

bylaws and i i think given the

the disruption that we've had in the last few meetings that it would be useful to have experience and i think

there will be opportunities for everyone to serve so that was my reason

can i just ask a clarifying question is the term until january 1st or is it

until a year from today that's a good question

yeah it's both of them really

what was the answer i lost maybe silence on that right so i i think we can decide

actually i think the bylaws say that they're elected every january

um so that that is what the bylaws say however um

in a situation of vacancy the bylaws are silent about whether that

restarts the clock or whether that would be

because technically if they if you're up in january that would be two terms

you're serving right um so the bylaws are silent on that and the

commission may amend the bylaws to clarify that um in the future but since they are silent uh i would

definitely probably go with whatever your bylaws do state which is every january okay so yeah we assume this is a

six month term essentially yeah and just to clarify my term ends in a year and a half so

i i still have plenty of time to like serve a full term of it

i would say that just for consistent with bylaws that we make it a six month term and

yep agreed and you know we can choose to rotate so okay

i will say um i'm i appreciate the um recognition and um also just

trust um from commissioner bernholtz and uh or sorry

yes commissioner reynolds and vice president slash president um chapel

um and also i think commissioner jardonic obviously would be phenomenal

as well um i have a lot of passion and energy for

this commission regardless of my capacity though i do have a lot of desire to come in and

roll my sleeves up and whether it's vice president or continuing as a commissioner but i would be privileged

and humbled to help get a fresh start with what is now i think a majority of a

new group of people um so um yeah thank you for the opportunity to

potentially have that um and just in defense of my own nomination

i've as has been mentioned i've been serving for about eight and a half years and i'm proud to say that i've only

missed a single meeting during that time and i think i was only late only once

but um i have been vice president twice before and also president twice before

and i also do a lot of support behind the scenes and supporting the secretary and helping

incoming presidents and i'm happy to help

you know educate people on on how the process works but i would be honored to just

serve a little bit more in my past in my last year and a half because the last time i served as an officer was

i think it was like five years ago or so

thanks i'm happy to support you on that

i perhaps can work with you on learning more of the ropes so that in six months perhaps

we can talk and explore what that might look like in the future

thank you uh okay so we will take a revote unless uh

commissioner bernholtz you have anything to add okay an expressive face all right

so should we take public comment nope oh we've already taken public comments so we'll just do another reboot okay

so um president buzz

how do you vote uh commissioner gerdonic okay uh commissioner bernd knowles

commissioner jerdonek commissioner dye commissioner jerdoneck

listener donna commissioner

all right thank you congratulations commissioner churdonic look forward to serving with

you uh passing the torch uh all right so uh we'll move on to agenda item

5. Approval of Minutes of Previous Meetings

number five approval of minutes of previous meetings discussion and possible action on the minutes of the

commission's february 14 2022 regular meeting and april 6 2022 special

meetings

all right so i had already given martha a heads up uh i just had two minor items

uh one voting works is one word uh so it's in yes i'd like to

amend the current draft and correct voting works name

uh and also if we could change motion to moved

where it appears twice in items uh it's okay form five otherwise it looked good

to minor titles okay otherwise it looked good okay thank you commissioner dye um

unless there's any other comments from the commission we'll go on to public comment

nope okay no one in person so martha can you go to public comments sure um i'm going to meet you caller um i'm

sure this is mr bill it is david pillpell

i hope you can hope you can hear me okay uh so just to follow up for uh one second on the

previous issue since there wasn't a second opportunity for uh public comment uh perhaps uh in her new capacity as

president uh president chapel will review the uh members of beaupac and

maybe commissioner shapiro could be armed twisted into serving on our chariot

into nudge um as to the minutes i would note that they were only posted yesterday i

haven't had a whole lot of time to go over them there were a couple of things that i noticed right off the bat on the

february minutes the header at the top left doesn't align with the

membership of the commission at that time i believe that was either commissioner mogi's last meeting or

second to last and uh member dai was not yet a member of the

commission in uh february so that should be a line and there was

some other stuff about spelling and whatnot and both stuff anyway i'm happy to

do a pass on the minutes if you want to approve them uh tonight with the understanding that uh non-substantive um

edits can be made by the commission's secretary with the approval of

i don't know president chapel or somebody uh or uh it could be

both sets could be put off again but i think it would be really helpful in the future to have the minutes available

when the other documents are posted so it's not like on 24 hours that we have

and if they're not ready they're not ready and i recognize that it took hours and hours to go through that uh big

meeting with the hundreds of speakers and the peppa pig and it's just yeah so the good news is that we have minutes

that reflect the record of what happened at the meetings bad news is it takes a while to get there but we should get

there and do it right just like counting ballots we should get the right answer it's not the fast answer so

take all of that for what you will thanks for listening and thank you martha and everybody

thank you so just for the record um i was actually appointed on february 10th so i actually

was a commissioner as of that meeting on february

um and i had sent a bunch of um edits for the april meeting some of

them were substantive so i wonder we should wait on the april ones i think we'll wait on april 6th

that's also longer so i'm sure members of the public will have a little bit longer to do on february 14th it sounds like we are

substantively in agreement we have some minor formatting and kind of

typographical changes so uh i would think that we would feel

comfortable approving those minutes with uh you know subject to those changes which martha and i will make together

if if any commissioner is comfortable with that and wants to move

that would be great so moved i mean that we approved the february 14

2022 drop minutes second perfect uh and we have taken public comment on

this item so martha can you go to a vote please vice president i'm sorry president chapel how do you vote yes

commissioner burnholes yes

the motion passes wonderful thank you everyone

6. Dominion Voting Systems Contract Extension

moving on to item number six dominion voting systems contract extension

discussion and possible action regarding the extension period for the city and county of san francisco's contract with

dominion voting systems commissioner jerdonek do you want to intro this item sure thank you

president chapel so this is an item that we've discussed a few times before

and at the last meeting we um did not discuss it because

you were away and we didn't have a chance to sit down with you but since the last meeting um we did

have a chance to sit down and just discuss the resolution and um

so the resolution draft that's a part of the packet today is basically the same

as what was presented or i should say attached to the packet of the last

meeting with the exception of a clause at the very end that's double underlined

and this was a way of addressing director arn's concern that he expressed two

meetings ago that he was wanted to make sure that he wasn't up

against a deadline in the last year and not having a voting system

so just basically expressing that we support ensuring that the department has a voting system in place like well in

advance of that election um that would follow that second year

extension so um president chappell did you want to say anything else about the resolution

yeah uh thank you commissioner jordanic and thank you for for working on the draft of this and a couple different

formats uh i think this addressed some of the concerns that were raised when it was initially brought up about

uh you know not including anything that would kind of be

a message we didn't want to send about a system that we would in fact be using and i think it also

adds that language kind of in deference to director arts and what he needs to accomplish from a

kind of operational perspective i think the one the two clauses that

commissioner jerdonek and i talked a little bit about and i would kind of specifically raise to the commission

are on page two uh the whereas clauses at at line 10 and line 14.

um i think we both you know we have not made any kind of resp you

know statement about those comments made by the dominion sales rep we've grappled

with that a bit um i don't think it's misplaced in this resolution but i don't necessarily think

it's necessary in this resolution so i think question you know a more specific question of the

commission is how we feel about those items and you know whether we want to retain them

if we do ultimately approve this resolution

could i just add one comment on that yeah yeah and i did we did discuss this together when we sat down and um i can

kind of go either way on it i feel like it's like president chapel said it's not totally necessary but at the same time

if we do include it i feel like that maybe adequate response to um

to kind of close that issue whereas if we don't include it i feel like

it seems like we we still need to do something more with respect to that

you know resolving that kind of outstanding issue so i feel like if it's in there then we

can kind of set this aside we've stated this on the record but if it's not in there then

we kind of need to do something more i think

i think that's an excellent point so i i would support leaving it in then

okay i didn't know their comments then uh do we have any motions

okay well i move that we adopt the resolution as revised in the packet

do you have a second second okay great then we'll move on to public comments i think we'll have a commenter

in public

hello commissioners brent turner and thanks for indulging me um some of these comments

seem to get redundant but for the sake of clarity within the record i just want to mention that the public supports

um this uh move ahead by the commission and and um

i just want to sort of recap a little what happened here for those that might

not be clear it's not that where anybody is picking

on dominion in particular the problem is is that

all three major companies that control the united states voting system market

um are operating on outdated software so we're we're dealing with a company that

not only is selling something to us that is outdated they're also price gouging

at the same time on top of that they're making comments through their

representative steve bennett public comments that this commission is

ignorant which is offensive and that san francisco voters don't care about

elections which is also incorrect and offensive um they

have been very very uh forward in

mentioning that john arndt and the department of elections are dominion's well-oiled machine

and and i think all these statements taken together um deserve a response and i've noted that

steve bennett nor dominion has decided to come forward and come here and defend anything any of these statements

we're thick-skinned and and you know this wouldn't be the the the uh

end of the world just these statements but the the problem for dominion is now that

whereas before we are trying to have the government create an open source system now a

non-profit has come along uh voting works and is willing to give effort here right on point so we're

just hopeful that again this commission sticks with the tradition for the past

14 15 years of leading the state and the country on this issue and and stand

strong and does not give dominion any benefit of any doubt when

it comes to contract as i think commissioner jerdonek has

been leading in pointing out there are ways to manicure the contract to best position the county rather than give in

to dominion thank you all right commissioner bernholtz

oh we can't hear you commissioner bernhardt thanks i don't know if you want to finish public comment before

my comment okay that's fine uh we'll move on to public comment from those attending remotely okay so we do have

one caller on the line i believe it's mr bill powell okay you are unmuted and you have three minutes to comment

great thank you um i'm just reading the document i'm assuming that

um [Music] the motion is to approve the resolution

with the uh changes so for example line two would strike uh

i'm sorry page two would strike lines one through nine and make the other uh changes

um i am assuming that's correct i am not particularly concerned with the

whereas pauses just to resolve clauses on page three the first resolve clause that the

commission supports extending i assume that that is merely stating the

commission's policy the commission can determine its policy but not

direct the director in a particular way with respect to

contracts that are under his sold jurisdiction

and in the final result requesting the board to extend the contract only one year this year i'm not

sure if the one-year contract extension would require board approval under

charter section 9.118 that

turns in part on the amount of money involved in the length of time so um i don't know if uh vca flora's

weigh in on that um but i think uh as i say that it's important that the

commission state clearly what its policy is and let the rest of the process run uh however

it runs without running into the non-interference clause of the

charter with respect to contracts and day-to-day administration of the department it gets a little

tricky and perhaps a little guidance might help

thanks for listening

okay i don't see any other hands raised okay uh commissioner bernholtz

did uh thank you does um dca flores want to

chime in on mr pilpel's question

so uh we don't provide legal advice to the members of the public um however if the commission has a question uh

you can ask it and i can respond well let me ask it then i mean um i want

to first of all thank uh president-elect chapel and and uh vice president jordanic for working on this i think i

do think it's it's important um but it sends messages in a in a variety

of different ways and i think it's very important that this commission at the very least acknowledge that we are cognizant of and attentive to

the very poisoned information atmosphere around the country right now um

about dominion software that's being used in a variety of ways by a variety of players with a variety

of motives and that signals that we may be wanting to send to a company may

easily be captured by those we're not intending to single signal anything to

or perhaps we are i don't i don't think we are um but i we uh i personally find

it this a very difficult choice because um what we're all we're really able to

do here is is uh send a signal of displeasure um

i don't believe uh the commission i i believe the the

resolution as it stands backs the commission away from interfering with director arns's sole responsibility

however it does also uh override in some ways it

sends a signal that we still wanted to say this regardless of what the director told us about what he needs

um so we're sending a lot of signals i'm not sure we're accomplishing anything and i want to again reiterate that we

cannot be certain how signals get picked up and read and used or misused so the

question from me to you dca flores is does this um stand firmly on the side of the

non-interference line um between the commission and director horns's responsibilities

one second

uh so in terms of violating the non-interference clause

i don't believe that this resolution does so because it simply is a request to the

board of supervisors thank you

thank you i just wanted to uh weigh in just

briefly um to support what um

commissioner bernholtz had mentioned um which is part of why i felt kind of strongly when we talked about this

probably my first meeting about the rathensburger case and

removing that component and i do think that the

well dominion may not be considered by some members of the public or commission um

to be the ideal solution it is the system we're working with now and i agree that

there is a lot of misinformation and um

honestly malice intended misinformation surrounding the voting system and i agree that we

are dancing we're playing a fine line between

ensuring that we're maintaining the integrity of the system that we're currently using

and while striving to hold accountable so i think if i guess one question i have is

i think commissioner jardonic you had said that you felt that or sorry vice president jordanic you

perceived that this the the section needed to remain in the resolution because it put

closure in some capacity to the issue of the um

to the issue and so do you feel that

without incorporating that specific piece you i think you had expressed some desire to

do something else can you just elaborate on that a little bit

yeah so but before i answer that question i just want to make very clear that this

resolution is not it's not its goal is not to signal displeasure with dominion it's more

it's about acting in consistency with our open source policy and that's that's why the

the resolution leads with the open source so the the thing about

what the and there's nothing negative in here about dominion as a company

or about about their voting system the only thing that's negative in here is the thing that the dominion sales

representative said so i think it's kind of secondary to what this resolution is trying to

achieve which is all it is is just to renew the contract one year

but um i was thinking that the reason to include in the first place

because it i think it is relevant but um at the same time it's not necessary

but in terms of bringing closure and this wasn't just me but it was as a as a body i think a lot

of us over the past several months have said we needed to do something more

given that he did not respond to the letter that um president at the time bernholtz wrote to

him and um so i think it's not just me but i feel

like as a body or individuals on this body felt that we had some like on something more that

we had to do to um [Music] acknowledge or respond to the fact that

he did not um you know reply to our letter asking him for an explanation

thank you for clarifying

i mean if he didn't say it he should tell us that you know for example but i think the reason i asked um and i

agree i get from the from the revisions of the resolution i

do think that open source source voting is the primary um kind of

i think it's the primary rationale i think just the inclusion of this piece um

uh i agree that it is concerning and there that there

was no response though if if the primary focus is around

open source voting it seems kind of an arbitrary piece to include in the resolution and

perhaps would require might be beneficial to have a separate um it and i actually i don't have like

particularly strong feelings it's more just for the purposes of dialogue of whether this is the right

forum to um elevate that and that's why i had asked about alternatives

because the quote in the newspaper

that we don't have additional information on because it wasn't responded to

as a rationale for not extending a contract i just am not sure if that is

really as crucial as really the emphasis on the

open source voting okay if we did can i just ask if we did remove it and this is a question to

everyone if we did remove it would people want to revisit that at a future meeting

on on how to proceed with that yeah i think we've this has come up in a number of

meetings and we've kept deferring it and i think you know we've my sense of what the commission has felt

is that there should be some response but we haven't really figured out what to do i think in part because we

are so sensitive to the issue that uh commissioner bernholtz has raised that we don't want to send

a a message that could be misappropriated in some way

um as it relates to this resolution you know part of what we talked about

before part of why you know i got more comfortable with it was because we were really focusing on

preserving optionality to move to a system that was in line with our mission

statement more so than moving away from a system that we did not like or did not think

worked because in reality that is the system we're going to be using and we have used and we've approved those

elections and so i think to some extent having these two whereas

clauses muddies the water a little bit because it does talk about kind of dominion

on the other hand if your vendor disparages you in the real world that is very much a reason to reconsider

your relationship so i don't think that's not kind of relevant for the purposes of a contract extension

but you know i i think maybe given how much kind of

heartburn we're having up here about this it might make sense to take it out of this resolution and then again

consider how to revisit the uh the issue with the dominion rap just

because it doesn't seem like we're and i don't want to speak for anyone else but just kind of the reaction i'm seeing

here is that you know this is maybe muddying the waters a little bit of what the purpose of the resolution is

can i just add one additional thing um which is i agree that the disparaging of

the [Music] the relationship is a is a problem but it is one sales representative and it's

not to say it's not problematic but i don't think that that is

as i just i would almost encourage a a second

letter or a second statement that is kind of a supplement to the resolution

that the resolution is primarily focused on the technology and or the software and the

the rationale behind that and then a secondary piece that is expressed at least stating discontent

with the not only the sales representative's lack of response but the organizational

lack of response um and that that did not that was not um

that did not bode well in the decision making of the contract but it

wasn't a deciding factor because it isn't i i didn't my perception of the last several months

was that wasn't a deciding factor it's the open source voting that is and so to just have those be cleanly separated

might be beneficial but i'm i'm open it's just something for

discussion so i just

you know honestly i could go either way on this because i do think this is intended to be an affirmative

resolution restating the commission's policy in support of open source voting and making sure that we allow room for

that and not make decisions that are inconsistent with our stated policy

however if we pull this out it might make it a bigger deal

i mean then it might really seem like there's an anti-dominion piece here um

so that's what i struggle with because on the one hand just like making statements of fact in this

document in a whereas clause not in a resolve clause right

just to provide context it's like it seems

you know like as chris said we could let it lie um if we pull it out it i wonder if it

makes it a bigger deal than we want it to so and by pulling it out you mean pulling it out and making its own

separate things that's a stand alone yeah item that it it perhaps

raises it to a level that you know we don't want to raise it to that that's my only concern

but i do understand your point that it you know there's a lot of stuff in here right that's why we took some other

stuff out but uh it isn't irrelevant right

i mean if you're talking about a different system whether it be open source or another proprietary system you kind of have to talk about the system

that you have so so and i think it's fairly it's factual

statements i mean there was a newspaper article and

president bernoullis did write a letter that was not responded to so it's a statement of facts i feel like

if we made it a standalone thing it would just perhaps be like i said

make it a bigger deal

i don't know how do you feel commissioner you're not like having thought about this some more well

i mean like i said earlier i can go either way and i think [Music]

i support a lot of the comments that everyone has been making so i would kind of defer to [Music]

um commissioner bernholtz and commissioner shapiro like what what would you like to

do on this i think i i think that's it's kind of

yeah that's kind of the point like if we remove it then do people do we really want to revisit

it at a future meeting and then um

yeah is that going to make it a bigger thing but um

i mean i can go either way i just i would like to see hear what

i commissioner bernholtz i i from my memory of your letter um which to be

fair i read months ago um we already expressly stated and i think

all of you would recall that it was inappropriate and disrespectful um and so

that would just be repeating something that was already included it seems like the only new

piece that we would be stating is that there was no response from dominion is that correct

that has been noted in prior minutes or it should have been

because i i i can go about i can go both ways but i'm curious if you have any shift in

your perspective after this conversation

i yeah i don't i i i'd like everyone else find this to be a lot of um

a lot of very uh important attention um to a document that i'm

not sure um kenner will bear the weight we're putting on it um

but i don't think i think i agree with uh i do agree with

commissioner jerdone's first comment that um keeping it in here um attends to it

i don't know if it puts that particular issue to bed but it attends to it and um i think the document actually does a

good job of framing this as being about open source okay and and that that's our that's our

uh that's the horizon we're aiming for so i i would lean toward leaving it in

let's leave it in okay i think then we're ready to take a vote

okay secretary delgadillo okay

um president chapel how do you vote yes commissioner bernhards

yes commissioner dye aye vice president

jordanic yes and commissioner shapiro yes okay with five in the affirmative

passes okay great thank you everyone

7. Redistricting Process Initiative

moving on item number seven redistricting process initiative

discussion and possible action regarding the commission's potential recommendations with respect to the san

francisco redistricting process including historical background in the proposed project plan

um for the purposes of this agenda item we're elevating stephen hill and julia

marks to panelists who are both in person

um so they'll not be restricted by the public comment uh time

constraints uh i'm going to pass it over to commissioner shapiro and

commissioner dai who are kind of spearheading this part of the process i'll let you give introduction and kind

of introduce your yes sure um

so uh after i put this item on the agenda for our last meeting the

commission directed uh me and commissioner shapiro to

hatch a plan on how we might have this public forum and discussion on how to

improve san francisco's redistricting process so we subsequently put our heads

together and commissioner shapiro kindly wrote up our

notes here uh which is posted in the packet as the first item

which we're calling the uh redistricting initiative um and what we wanted to do is uh

hopefully agree on objectives and and deliverables

uh and we we have proposed a general approach that uh

uh we didn't want to

put too many uh boundaries on this um but we did uh kind of organize the the

different aspects of the redistricting process into kind of categories uh and then we left open

at the bottom of this document you'll see um

discussion about what the timeline should actually be if there are speakers the commission would like to hear from

any thoughts on public outreach and engagement and what a final delivery may or may not look like and i will say that

we don't have to decide on that right now there's also

some deadlines coming up that may push the deadline in terms of

valid initiatives that might go on the november ballot so there may be external events that may

push us one way or the other um commissioner shapiro do you want to run

through this really quickly and then we can invite our our guests to speak and address the

commission sure the comprehensive yes or just the approach

um go through the document however you feel would be most helpful sure um

[Music] really the goal the kind of overview of this is just to

follow up on the attention that was brought to the regis searching process

earlier this year and offer a public forum for education dialogue and strategic recommendations

from various stakeholders but predominantly the public and independent

advocacy groups um and we really wanted to

lay out a clear objective where we can look at the current process and explore

the alternatives to um procedures from the comprehensive

holistic uh process from pic qualifying uh candidates from outreach uh for the task

force to their actual processes their when they are what kind of trainings they are required

to do to the actual mapping and drafting process and community feedback

um and then potentially depending on where we land from all of

the feedback um informing a memorandum or as commissioner dai mentioned a

charter amendment um initially we had discussed that this

initiative may be a six-month process though depending on many

considerations it could extend longer and it is a joint undertaking by all

members of the elections commission although commissioner dye has extensive experience in redistricting

and i did support the general approach and initiative plan

this will be a joint initiative amongst all members and we encourage the public

to participate in the process um we may also call special meetings um as

needed um as we may need to spend additional time to have a discussion

specifically related to subject matter around redistricting

as i mentioned we're going to allow space to examine the holistic redistricting process

and thinking about this in kind of five buckets um first looking at the task

force member composition and commissioner dye put together a really

helpful uh review of best practices

um kind of a high level understanding of what san francisco redistricting process looks like and then

um what other independent commissions um or task forces

processes are and how they differ and so um i that kind of informed some

of these um these buckets though please know this is not set in stone so ty sorry

type is an independent body of citizens um or um open to other discussion the structure

of the task force so um the size uh currently we're at nine um perhaps it

would be larger depending on the need um and also the process of alternates um

which became a topic of conversation over the last process when we were asked

to uh consider the the circumstances with our own appointees and what would happen should

anything change with our appointees what that process should be to ensure it's free and fair

how candidates for the task force are recruited the timing the channels candidate pool

and ensuring that is broad and inclusive but also that they are well represented

so qualifications for task force members um ensuring that

our communities who are most marginalized are incorporated in the process and included from an equity

perspective and then also the selection criteria and vetting conditions so really trying to

minimize any sort of political influence or special interest influence

and then onboarding is really just what is the process once task force members have been selected um how are they

preparing what is the staffing and support the tactical planning how is that developed consistent to

best practices and not just the kind of discretion of whomever is on the task

force um and then criteria this is a big may may require a big

component of the cross the initiative even though it's the smallest bullet on

the approach and that is because um there is a very

thin there are very thin requirements as it pertains to not thin but um

let's say light outline of the criteria required for redistricting and

trying to evaluate what is the best approach um and what criteria we should be using to

determine or excuse me how task force should determine what a draft map and boundary outlines should should be

and then the operation so once the the the process of redistricting is

going into effect um what is that public outreach process

who who are they reaching out to what is the procedural mapping process what is the voting process and how is

um how are all of those components documented and then accountability and

transparency which was a big issue in this most recent

process is the public input and the decision-making processes

uh the communications between commission commissioners

and other political members um and then also looking at

member replacement and recourse if there's for example a deadline that's broken or um there is some sort of

misconduct um these are kind of the key elements of accountability and transparency that we

proposed are talking points um for the commission to

consider as we think about improving the integrity and fairness of the

redistricting process commissioner die did i miss anything no

i think that was very complete i wanted to invite other commissioners

to ask questions or if there are any thoughts on this proposal before we

ask some of our invited guests to give us some historical contacts uh commissioner bernholtz

yeah thank you and i want to thank both commissioners diane shapiro for your work on this i do have at this point um

i mean i'll have several questions um but i do have

one question about scope uh that goes actually to the use of the word holistic which appears several times in the

document um although i'm not always sure correctly um

i think it's important if we proceed in any direction like this

to put boundaries about this and i would argue that um given that it

is a question that san francisco voters like to revisit

um which is whether or not we should have districts at all um that

we uh bound this in such a way that it is focused on redistricting

in a system that has district supervisor supervisors and that we actually um

don't open ourselves up to every possible question that could be brought before a group

like this so i'm not sure if that's um i i'm confused by the frequent use of

the word holistic in here and so i should ask both the commissioners diane shapiro if if you meant to open it

beyond beyond that um if it's not clearly stated

um there are eager members of the public uh members of the folk quite eager to to

reopen that decision which i think is beyond the purview of what you've described here

yeah so i think that uh when we were talking about holistic i think we meant

that although we kind of bucketed this out into five different categories that they can't be

considered in isolation for example you know the size of the commission

impacts the voting requirements um you know and the selection process uh

informs how you might remove or replace the commissioner so even though those are in separate buckets that

uh at we kind of broke it down so we could um you know kind of do a deep dive on these

uh in a in a logical way but at the end we'll have to you know put it back together again so to speak

in a holistic framework that might be a series of recommendations that would

form a charter amendment so i think that that was the primary

reason for holistic uh as opposed to completely opening up

the question of whether we should have districts or not would you agree commissioner schempero yeah i just

wanted to jump in and i really appreciate that perspective um commissioner bernholtz i think being

able to clarify what that means um and that it isn't it that it is within the

confines of us of having supervisors um

the system of supervisoral districts um i think that's an important piece that we can absolutely specify

um in the context of the use of the word holistic it was um repeatedly used for

uh the purposes of demonstrating that this isn't just simply the

actual process of drafting maps um but really includes everything that

happens before the task force even begins its work um and what if it

doesn't complete its work and so it's kind of the pre during and after process

of redistricting but not questioning whether redistricting should happen at all so i think that should be

incorporated and i appreciate that feedback great thank you very much um

the other question i have and i don't know this could wait um but i'm

assuming that the members of the commission are aware that the sunshine ordnance uh task force

held a special meeting on monday with members of the redistricting task force i'm not aware of any outcomes of that

meeting or what happened i um was late to finding out about it um

and i would just be curious if anyone here participated or has any sense of what happened at that meeting i believe

it was on monday going to speak to that i believe

just in time thank you director orange oh yeah well i didn't attend either

commissioner bernhard but uh the task force was trying to determine who the record keeper was

especially for the emails related to or associated with the task force members and my understanding was that the clerk

of the board's office was designated as the record keeper uh however the department of elections

is the department that's up the email account with the department of technology

and the concern is that when an email account is is cancelled there's a 30-day clock that starts

ticking and once like once three days um hits then the account essentially wiped clean

and so the department since we had received some

records requests prior to this this is task force meeting uh this week or last week whenever it

was uh we had already saved all the emails onto our server so and we also put a litigation hold on the account so

there's no danger of the uh of the information being deleted or

not available and it doesn't matter if dt were somehow to to move forward

uh in this the litigation hold and somehow you know uh let the account

expire so that's sort of a summary of the situation super that's very helpful i would also

just then note that um i suppose

that's captured in this outline under number 5c intracommissioned communications and political

communication but since it's a lived experience problem we would want to make sure any

future review process addressed some of those issues like

um staffing and technology and responsibility and things like that that's a good point i agree

i'm finished thank you okay i have a um a couple

a few comments but i just wanted to begin by thanking both of you for your good work on this it's

it's obvious that you've spent a lot of time you know thinking about this and it seems very comprehensive

in terms of what's what can be covered um so i have two very minor things i just

wanted to add to the list and then kind of a larger comment that is similar to the comment that commissioner bernholtz

made um just there are two things i don't i don't think we're specifically called

out but one is um like who should appoint the members you know as distinct from the

composition so maybe that section could be phrased something like composition and

selection maybe and then the second thing was like independent of the onboarding and

when the map making process should begin maybe have a something about the overall timeline

and in particular how early can the members be appointed

relative to like when the maps or the census data is finalized you know can they start potentially

earlier just to give more time for the whole process it's kind of kind of more of a legal

let me ask for clarification on that um so when you say the overall timeline and

how quickly like the mapping process can begin once commit task force members have been

selected are you referring to something different from to be

the tactical planning of the timeline just are you suggesting

that we provide strategic recommendations about how quickly members should or members should be

selected can you just clarify what specific part of that so i was i was saying timeline like separate from

the timeline once the task force is appointed so like even earlier like how because i

think right now it's kick-started when the census date is finalized but like are there are we would you be legally

allowed to start picking members even before that just to kind of get things rolling yeah i mean and

i believe also this year because the census data came out so late that process did start earlier did it

not i'm not sure um yeah we actually census data was

released yeah yeah we the elections commission actually uh if i recall appointed our

appointees first and then actually tried to move the board and mayor along

be knowing that the data would come out and the

task force would have to start map making the idea was to try to

point the body to do some of this pre-work before that it was not a successful effort but i

think uh commissioner gerdonic's recommendation is right on point again from recent experience

so just to not to harp on this but so i understand correctly

basically best practices on how quickly the the kickstart the whole thing

yep yeah just to clarify what i was saying the um the when

the mayor the board of supervisors and the elections commission can appoint as

prior to census data one additional thing i wanted to get into that is also

exploring alternatives if say one of the appointing bodies does not

meet that best practice um is there a suggest do we want to also incorporate a

suggestion of um alternatives where if there aren't

specific deadlines that are met by those appointing bodies then the elections commission would step in to appoint the

others because it sounded like the process had that had slowed the process down in some

capacity so i guess just making sure that i understood your comment so i can incorporate the feedback and then adding

that additional point yeah yeah and then the last comment was related to what commissioner bernhard

says and it's kind of related to the holistic word but um

so and also there's a sentence in there about how the purpose of redistricting

is to ensure fair supervisorial representation so one of the

one of the um sort of like

i'm not sure if problems is the right word but one of the issues that comes up in these types of conversations is

people um might not be aware that there are

alternatives to single member districts that can provide better representation

for voters that it's sort of like an inherent limitation of only having

one person represent a district and it's not just the matter of

whether there's districts but even if you do have districts you could elect

multiple people from a district you know perhaps proportionally and um

so and i understand that there may be a desire to to limit the scope of the

conversation but i think if we do limit the scope of the conversation i think we should um it would be good to

acknowledge the limitations of single member districts and then state

you know maybe without making recommendations beyond it but just that there are these other approaches

although they won't be considered within the scope of this document so um

just so that we don't promote a perception that this is kind

of like the best that can be done with respect to representing the voters

if we do decide to to limit the scope in that way i have a question for commissioner

bernholtz because i think commissioner dirdonick is talking about a situation where there

still would be districts but they may not be single member districts or there may be fewer

districts and would you feel like that would be

um you know would it be worth having part of a session to just

educate the public and the commission on what some of these other alternatives look like

could i just add one and but just so you know commissioner bernholtz and also not just but also how they're elected like

whether they're elected proportionally you know or or versus

yeah from my you know my perspective on this is

for the elections commission to take on lessons learned and better practices

as an educational process for both ourselves as as the commission

and in our role vis-a-vis the public um

to do that within the confines of the existing laws about

supervisorial districts in the city and county is a massive undertaking

it's huge what you've outlined here it's critical it's important i don't know that there's anybody else

to do it and therefore i can be convinced that we should do it but it's an enormous task

to go anywhere beyond that i actually think gets beyond the realm

of the elections commission into real public policy making about the

democratic processes um and

we are a body in charge of uh oversight of the department not in charge of public

policy about democratic practice so um just to say nothing of the fact that i don't think we're resourced well

enough to do so so uh my own thinking about this is um

the smallest piece of work that i could the tightest boundaries i

could draw around this piece of work still leaves an enormous amount of work

uh so i'm i think it's um not something we could do well i don't

necessarily think it's in our purview to take on those bigger questions i agree with uh commissioner gerdonic that a

well-crafted memo that says we're not taking those on because they're beyond our

our resources and our scope is is sufficient because to not say it is

um to pretend that we have all agreed that this is the best but it's also um i

think it's important that you that boundaries be drawn on this or will never get anything else done

um right i appreciate that well stated

not sure we'll get this done but i know we'll never get anything else done well you know much better resourced

organizations have like not succeeded in debating this issue so um but i do think in the same way in the

document that uh that was shared um at the last meeting i i

acknowledged it you know in a sentence in the intro for the same reason because

because of exactly what you said we don't want to pretend that the system we have is the best but it is the system we have and and i do think it is squarely

within our purview to at least fix the system we have so um

i guess just a few points i think piggybacking off of commissioner bernholtz and

i wasn't here at the last meeting i absolutely agree that something should be done as a reaction to and in response

to the feedback we got from you know our meetings that involve the

redistricting task force i guess i have more questions at this point than answers i

i are we the right body to do this i don't necessarily think that we are i agree i

don't know who else would be that body but um we're not experts and i know one of

the goals is to educate ourselves more and i know commissioner dye you have a lot of anecdotal

uh experience and expertise but i think i think that is concerning to me i think

a number of these items i mean you know we reaffirmed our independence from the redistricting task

force i think a number of these items go a bit to decision making and values and those

things and so i get a little bit concerned whether we're kind of getting involved in the

substance of it more so than just the process um

again i don't necessarily think we are i guess i just have a question to see how this would all come

how this would materialize i think if i were looking at it just in a vacuum

we are involved with appointing the task force members so i think certainly it's

appropriate for us to give advice and guidance to future us on

how that works and i think that's kind of to some extent a few of your items in number one

um because that's something we we can control and we have direct experience in i think the question of oversight came

up quite a bit and that's one that we talked a little bit about in our meetings we never really resolved so i think that's something we should talk

about in how that you know oversight generally and how that looks for our appointees

specifically all of the other stuff i get a little bit more

i guess i'm just not certain that we're the right ones to tackle it um we did get a lot of feedback directly from

you know subject matter specialists and members of the public during our meeting so i think it's important that we

memorialize that i guess again the synthesis of all of this this exercise that we're building

out which as commissioner bernholtz has kind of said is is pretty massive

i just i'm i'm not sure it's for uh it's it's our job or appropriate for us to do it but i can be convinced certainly i

don't know who else there is um i think getting into super you know

the fact that the conversation already went to whether supervisor i'm not even going to say that word

correctly districts is appropriate is a that's a politicized issue in the city which is

certainly not our goal to wade into and is also just so massive and i don't think we can tackle all of democracy

with a little d so uh i guess more questions than any answers i'm just

i'm i guess a little bit skeptical of our ability or the appropriateness of this commission to tackle all of this

so i'll stop there sure but also thank you for your work i i know i saw a draft go back and forth i

know how much time and effort you put into this thank you um thank you president chapel

i really appreciate that feedback and all additionally the

component of oversight which was is just an ongoing ether of confusion um

and i i think it's fair to talk i think your

point about you know thinking about member composition and also the elements of you know our appointees

what they might be accountable for i think that all is fair one thing that i

that i don't think that had been included in some of that point that i do feel like

we should address as a commission is the amount of community input surrounding

the lack of of accountability transparency

and fairness um for um for communities and specifically

marginalized communities um that there was a concern about that being tainted in

some capacity but also what i've continued to say in many meetings and those meetings is

that i i am most concerned about

communities coming to our meetings and saying we're not being listened to

we're not being incorporated our communities are being split up and we're not being provided

clarity on why and i do feel that as an appointing body

it's our responsibility to it to really take that feedback to heart and

also open it up to those same communities to say to ask what they would want to see different

so that we can then kind of synthesize it and share it with the board of supervisors in a memorandum

to make the process more fair and so if we do narrow the scope which

i'm open to i just really want to make sure that the community

input and outreach and participation is something that is strengthened

so um to address some of your concerns directly

president chapel i i you know if you look at the three appointing

bodies we're the only non-partisan independent body

uh you know i think part of what i would want to explore

is whether the appointment process should go the way it currently goes um you know

i think if you look at best practices um you know the

[Music] board of supervisors in particular has a direct vested interest in the outcome and should they be part of the process

so i think that it's not obvious that there's anybody else who would look at it

and i the reason that i was inspired to take this on even though i had thought i'd left this behind me

um is that our mandate as the elections commission we were created to ensure

you know free fair and functional elections and if if if the maps are not fair

everything else that director arms does after that doesn't matter so so to me it's like goes fundamentally to

to why the elections commission exists the other thing i would say is

i don't think we need to decide at this moment what the outcome is

i think that this could we could decide we purely want to provide a public forum and really

educate ourselves and the public and you know

catalyze debate so that other people can go forth with a charter amendment

um i do think if there are other charter amendments that are proffered

whether it be from the board of supervisors or you know groups out there that put something on

the ballot i would think that we would want to comment on it

but in the absence of anything else we may decide to just like throw all this information out there and and see what

bubbles up and simply respond if if something comes up and i think we don't have to decide that now

like i said there may be external events that uh our dcas have promised to keep

us informed of if there's you know other charter amendments that are you know percolating out there

that we'll have some advanced notice and then we can decide whether we want to speed up our timeline or not

so um so i think that can be decided later and maybe after

we're a lot more you know all of us feel very smart on this topic um

and the other thing is i would be concerned precisely because of my point about the holistic nature of this

of like picking and choosing which one of these categories we look at because i i really don't think they can be looked

at in isolation um so

i do think we take it on we we should explore all of these things but like i said we don't have to

necessarily come up with a recommendation at the end the other common oversight i actually feel fairly

strongly on this and i actually feel like we did essentially decide this in that last

meeting by affirming the independence of the redistricting task force i don't believe the san francisco elections

commission has oversight over the reducing task force that in our current

charter we are simply an appointing body and we have an interest over our three appointees which is why we

had that special meeting um you know that is something that we could

discuss right the type independent you know body that that is you know item

number one a uh i don't imagine we would say it's a bad

idea but if you have an independent body you need to have some guardrails so that

you know you you'd want to feel comfortable that any group of whatever the number is of commissioners

that you would be comfortable with the selection process with the composition with whatever outreach was done to to

get those people on the commission and whatever protections there are for the public for

accountability transparency and removal of these commissioners that you would end up with a fair map at

the end of it so that's kind of what

uh my thinking was on on kind of looking at these different aspects and i think that commissioner

shapiro did a good job of bucketing all of the line items i had in my table in the last uh

for the last discussion document so i'm wondering if there are other

questions i i'm thinking that our first guest speaker will really help put this in historical

context and might raise more questions i just wanted to say one very small thing

which was in response to a small comment you made um pertaining to

if the representation of the supervisory supervisor

um are not fair then everything else doesn't matter and i want to be kind of careful with that type of thing because

um i believe any exercising in the democratic process is important and critical and i

know you didn't mean it that way but i just think that was something i really felt strongly about supporting that there's

so much to the democratic process and um obviously we want fair maps

but respectfully having just wanting to respect the process of

our electorate and voters and our election administration so well said

Invited Speaker: Steven Hill

are there any other questions before we ask our first of our speakers to

help us understand with that mr stephen hill if you would

grace us at the podium here his bio has been posted

so i'm not going to go through the his very impressive background but say i will note that he has been a past

advisor to this body and we are very lucky to have someone with his expertise who happens to also

be a san francisco resident so please regale us with the history of

redistricting in san francisco great thank you can you hear me all right um well it's good to be back before this

body and good to see director arts again um and congratulations on another election nothing

no ballot boxes floating in the bay nothing of this nature so we all remember those days or some of us do

anyway um so um it's uh it's my pleasure to tell you a

little bit about uh my involvement has been in in what i call multi-other everything

cities trying to get representation in multi-everything cities for the past 25 years and every city is different uh you

have to find the the what works for your city what works for your demographics

and so that led me to be involved in um in 1994

there was a ballot measure called uh proposition l that was past creating an elections task

force very much similar to you but its uh purview was broader um it was came out

of a an a historical move to go back to district elections in san francisco and

so the i think that the assumption on the part of many people when that election task force was passed by the

voters was that it was going to be the step towards going towards district elections

and um the people who were appointed they were appointed by a diverse body just like

you are they were non-experts there were no experts on this task force at all it was pretty much like the tradition so

you've heard about perhaps about citizens assemblies and how citizen assemblies are assemblies of almost

randomly selected jury pools and you you bring them together and you give them the expertise and then they they bring

their values which are not supposed to be steeped in those of incumbents and partisanship to come up with the best

solutions so uh this elections task force met and lo and behold they ran

into pretty much the same thing you ran into in the redistricting this time around except this was 25 years ago and

that was it looked out you know when you start looking at where different communities live

and how you're going to draw districts for them um you discover that it's not so easy to do because i remember one conversation

people saying oh that will be the north beach um little italy district cinema said no

that would be the chinatown district and so you had different immediately different demographics who were always

already starting to make claims on this will be mine this will be yours and these sorts of things so as a result of

that the elections task force actually put on the ballot a second proposal um what's now called proportional ranked

choice voting because they wanted to give the voters a choice it was up to the voters to decide they didn't want

the incumbents decided they wanted to have the non the nonpartisanship of the elections task force and then the

the uh the the values of the of san francisco voters to decide what is best for them

um in the process of drafting these two initiatives this was proposition g proposition h

uh the elections task force was pretty insistent that the district lines would need to be in the ballot measure because

they realized that the district's lines are crucial so that process was turned over to

um professor rich de leon at the public rich research institute at san francisco

state university and i was an advisor to professor de leon as to the elections task force and

to different members of the task force and so you know they set about trying to draw

these lines and professor de leon drew drew a number of maps just like you went through recently

they were put out to the community feedback was was given and then the the the maps were

one of them was selected by the elections task force to go into the voter initiative proposition g

and my prime i like this joke that one of my primary contributions was i i was

one of two people that had to drive every line of the districts to make sure they weren't going into alleyways and

such things and we did find a few that were going um in the wrong direction so those had to be adjusted

um so proposition g wins um 56 percent of the vote i think it was

and it goes into effect it didn't go into effect until 2000 and um the uh

now part of the deliberations of the elections task force was about criteria and you know at the time uh you didn't

have things like social media and really powerful computers that everybody can get their hands on everyone a lot of

community groups drawing their own district lines so the um the criteria were uh of the advice of

the city attorney were left fairly vague there was no order of prioritization so you had

criteria like communities of interest compactness contiguity the usual ones you saw in redistricting at that time in

the mid 90s this was not anything radical really though it was a fewer cities did it than states and federal

government but it's it was allowed uh to to to have criteria but just not to

really have strong orders of priorities with it and it wasn't like it was necessarily legal just the city

attorneys being how they are they tend to be um conservative and they you know a number of things were put in there to

make sure that it would all hold up illegally so um you know when professor de leon drew the

district lines um some of the same conversations you saw this last time around in districts 10 and districts one

went on so you had district 10 which is you know bayview hunters point petro and

um you know whether that would be a majority uh minority black district it wouldn't it was population wasn't high

enough um linking it with the uh the uh progressive to liberal um

uh perspective in portrayal hill so you'd have the chance for a black influence district as it's called so it

would allow a black candidate to potentially win their um by making uh alliances with the

progressive to liberal white population in portrayal hill and in fact the first um supervisor from

their sophie maxwell from district 10 came from portrayal hill so she was able to create those

relationships that then for the last 20 years has given um ongoing black representation in district

10 even as the black population has dwindled and then in district one there was a big

discussion around whether c cliff should be part of um uh district two or district one

and you know contiguity versus compactus versus communities of interest and the decision was made and

generally i would say even though the criteria weren't ranked in any way generally communities of interest was

the criteria that was relied upon the most and so it was decided that c cliff was a

more of a community interest with the marina rather than with uh

the rest of district one and you know so we saw that conversation again renewing uh in this most recent

round so the district lines were set voters voted on it they went into place in 2000 first

elections occurred in 2000 um and um

so there wasn't any initial redistricting because the districts were already there um the

then in 2010 next opportunity for redistricting came around there hadn't been much population shift

and um you know by and large the daily on districts as they were called were

considered still fairly valid for san francisco in 2010

and there really wasn't much controversy around it it all was quite smooth even though there was a redistricting

task force set up but it all was fairly non-controversial i should also say also in uh as part of

the overview of san francisco elections in march 2002 is when we passed ranked

choice voting uh first election was in november of 2004

it was the first um passage of any kind of ranked ballot system

in the united states in many many decades and um and getting that already was a lot of

work as we know getting the voting equipment ready getting the vendor ready it was all new so everybody was trying to figure it out so um

we got that figured out and then and and you know things kept moving forward until

then we get to uh you know 2000 oh the other thing i wanted to mention was the elections task elections commission

itself that was established by proposition uh e in two in november 2001.

so in november 2001 there was a ballot measure put on for both the elections commission and to revamp the um the

ethics commission and this was part of a broader you know that was when we were having ballot boxes in the bay and these

sorts of things and there was a big push in san francisco that passed with 63 percent of the vote very strong vote in

favor of establishing this commission um in which different appointing authorities from different

branches of government would be able to have input into what would happen here

and it was also almost a unanimous vote of the board of supervisors to create the elections commission so this was

something that everyone viewed as something it's time had come to do this before that um

the uh the the the redistricting task force

as it was going to be reconstituted every 10 years would have been appointed by the director of elections which at

the time was actually called the registrar of voters um and so this was part of prop

g created said that if an elections commission is ever created uh

uh if if uh elections commissions ever created then then then the redistricting

would be handed over to that um the three appointees to the redistricting task force would be handed

over to the elections commission rather than to the directive election so it was all part of you know prop g in 1996 then

setting up the elections commission itself in 2001. so um

so then we flash forward to 2020 2021 and suddenly a much different situation

arises population shifts in san francisco um there is uh you know

much more controversy around redistricting as we just saw and it but for me it was very very

familiar because it was almost like the same conversations in 1996 over how to draw those original district lines in

the communities of interest versus contiguity versus compactness and you know i mean this is really the challenge

in any kind of uh single seat district system is that you know my representation uh my my win

is potentially your loss and and so the san francisco sort of ex

avoided this conversation for 20 years because the original lines were done in

a fairly uncontroversial way by professor rich de leon overseen by the elections task force and then 2010 was

non-controversial so now you know in 2021 suddenly you're experiencing

the controversy that pretty much every state every city that has districts experiences and and and

um you know there are options that you can do about prioritizing the criteria

perhaps there's lots of things you could start looking into but it doesn't change the fundamentals that

when you have 11 seats and you have 800 something thousand people in san francisco and you have various

uh constituency groups and minority groups and everybody defining themselves

a certain way in this multi-everything city you're going to find yourself um

you know up against a real challenge often so um

that i guess the uh the thing i would leave you with is i have a rule of thumb i like to call it

uh it's called i call it the golden rule of representation give unto others the representation you

would have them give unto you and i think pretty much san francisco violated that this past uh redistricting

and so if you have a think of that as a golden rule that guides you as you think about

how are you going to build into an inherently controversial process

something in which people try to respect each other and try to give representation to others that they

would like to have that might be um a good uh

you know rule of thumb and and i'll and just kind of as my for my own amusement i'll pass on to you

what professor rich de leon said in 1996 he said don't be stuck to the fly paper

of old ideas there's lots of ways to give better representation today

including better ways to do redistricting you can do things like randomly drawn

um commissioners on the redistricting task force uh there's lots of ways to do this

that that no one knew about in 1996 for the most part so be a little experimental be a little

bold and uh and push forward you might find that uh it becomes very energizing and exciting for the people in san

francisco who right now i think are feeling a little beat down by the process

thank you thank you thank you

questions questions

um i have a question so one of the questions that uh

raised by uh ah raised by uh president uh

uh chapel was you know who who

who should should do this look at how to improve the redistricting process should

it be the elections commission or is there another body that might do it

well um you know in in reading proposition e the the wording for it there's nothing

in there that does suggest that you shouldn't um but there's certainly nothing that says that it's your job

um and it's um i remember with the elections task force

they had to take on a lot of things and deal with a lot of things that they didn't really anticipate initially

um because it's just inherent in the process you know it's hard when you're writing this legislation i've written

legislation you try to cover unintended consequences but you know you it um you can't always do

that so you know you could leave it up to the board of supervisors but obviously there's

inherent problems with that you know you want to remove the self-interest from it

um i i mean there's really no other body in san francisco maybe there should be

in fact i'm writing an article right now about what's going on portland oregon um they're making a very big a charter

commission just has recommended some very big changes there and they actually have a in their charter it calls for

the um a charter commission to be established every 10 years so if san francisco had something like

that you could have a charter commission right after the redistricting uh task force

does its work possibly badly and um and so you'd have a a process

already built in that would allow this kind of discussion to continue

um so you know i i really i'm hard pressed to think i mean the off the mayor's office

has an office of of neighborhoods that could be a potential body but you know i

i remember in the past trying to get the officer uh the office of neighborhoods to do

um education around ranked choice voting right and you know we were advised not a good idea you know you don't want the

mayor's office doing that it's not considered objective fair nonpartisan kind of thing so

um if there's no other body set up i guess it depends on one's personality i say go for it but you know you have to

you have to really gauge that for yourselves i mean it doesn't have to be a lot of work uh i don't think it but it

is you know it is work and so and i remember the you know the election the elections commission uh when

reverend arnold townsend was on it um he he wanted to do more things like um education in the

community and uh you know he was uh one especially to do in the black community

um so there's been in the past of the elections commission i mean i've been coming to these meetings since the first

ones in 2002. in the past there have been you know uh

elections commissions that took on doing bigger

tasks that needed to be done but there wasn't any obvious body in san francisco to do it

and and so you know really it's whatever four out of seven votes decides or four out of five in

this case so well the ethics commission only has five

so everything you do there needs a lot of things need four votes out of five so

thank you any other questions before we go to our next speaker

um julia square yes and we have julia marks who is the

Invited Speaker: Julia Marks

voting rights program manager at uh asian law caucus and has addressed this

body before and her bio is also posted and she has a few comments to make

great thank you all so much um thank you for having me but mostly thank you for putting

time into this topic and hopefully for putting a fair amount more time into it over the next

six months or so it's very important that the elections commission looks into this as you know

it was a very difficult redistricting process and the public wants to know what can be done differently but

redistricting is incredibly complex thank you for putting together a list of

potential topics i think that itself is a testament to how hard this can be for

folks to wrap their head around and having a structured environment led by a

non-political body where these conversations can happen where experts can be brought in where

documentation can be collected and shared so people can understand all the factors that go into making a successful

redistricting body that's really important and so i really hope that you guys do vote to take the

time to continue to work on this and talk about it and give information and structure to the public for this

conversation it also is very much in the scope of your work um you guys are tasked with

overseeing elections here and as commissioner i mentioned elections fully depend on the system

underneath them including the maps and so it's important that you help lead this conversation

um i really appreciated mr hill's context on san francisco specifically but i'm

going to pivot us to a bigger picture and talk some about the history of local

redistricting in the state of california something that's very exciting is that there's redistricting happening in

different forms all over the state different types of commissions um with different authority different structure

different timelines and there's a lot for you guys to think about and learn from looking at that

landscape so i won't get into each of those pieces today i think that's something you guys

should plan for later but i wanted to kind of step back and show how those pieces fit together

across the state and how they've evolved so there's been a tremendous growth in the

number of california cities and counties using redistricting commissions over the last decade

it's really a laboratory here there's a lot to see historically local governments uh did

their own redistricting so the legislative body decided the maps and shows who their voters were

but now they're basically four types of redistricting bodies in california so

the um the legislative body so that's where the city council is doing it or the board of

supervisors the old rule but we also see advisory commissions where they're just

recommending maps we see hybrid commissions where they're selecting a couple maps and then the

legislative body decides and then we see independent commissions and again there's variety within

independent commissions the phrase is usually used to mean that the independent commission is the

one that chooses the map but the actual independence from the political process can go beyond that and

that's where a bunch of the items and your list of potential topics come into play so who's the appointing body

what are some of the guard rails around qualifications what are conflict of interest roles so there are kind of two

types of independents when we're thinking about commissions decision making authority and then the guard rails that try to protect the system

from political influence as well so sf uses an independent commission um

and it's actually one of the first big cities in california to do that it was san francisco and san diego back in the

90s and there's been a lot of growth since then and that's for a few reasons so

first there's the policy side folks don't want their elected officials to be choosing the electoral boundaries in

their city or county so that's part of the push second the state commission has been

well respected and was seen as pretty successful and so i think that got a lot

of advocates and communities to think oh we can have something similar to this at the local level

so the crc's first round was back in 2010 and so we've seen a lot of commissions since 2010 that actually

replicate a lot of the structures and components of the state commission so

cities that have similar structures include oakland sacramento berkeley and l.a

county as well so those look a fair amount like the state commission

um we've also seen an increase in the use of independent commissions in cities that have moved to district

systems because of litigation or potential litigation under the california voting rights act so those

acts are trying to improve representation for minority communities and usually in the package that comes

with the settlement there will be a move toward independent commissions because it's so important for the commission

structure to support communities of interest and diverse communities as as boundaries are redrawn

after the census and then we've also seen growth in

redistricting commissions in california recently because there have been some really important legal changes at the state

level so historically only charter cities were able to set up independent

commissions state law said that general lost cities and counties

had to do their own line drawing and have the final authority so a general

law city or county could have an advisory commission or have staff work on the mapping but at the end of the day

the politicians were the ones choosing their own lines charter cities due to california's

homeworld doctrine right are were always able to set up an independent commission if they wanted to so that's how san

francisco was able to do that um but it didn't really take off until the

last 15 years or so um but in 2016 there was a bill that

allowed counties and general lost cities to also do independent commissions it

also allowed advisory commissions though those are not seen as a best practice and often leave the public fairly

disappointed so with that line 2016

it suddenly became possible for any city or county to do this the 2016 legislation was also important

because it set out minimum conflict of interest rules for independent commissions

but it just applied to general lost cities and counties so that's just one of multiple examples where there's law

out there that applies in some parts of california that has not been included in san

francisco structure but is something you could look at you could look at that state statute which applies elsewhere in

the in other types of jurisdictions um and some of those conflict of interest

rules include prohibitions on the potential the commissioner or their

family members engaging in certain political activities leading up to their service as well as

prohibiting certain activities after their service um that legislation 2016 also set out

commission transparency requirements and public engagement requirements

and it prohibited the independent commissions from drawing districts for the purpose of favoring or

discriminating against a political party incumbent or political candidate

so those were really good government reforms but again didn't necessarily apply statewide just to the general lost

cities and counties that opted to create which not everyone did

independent commissions so [Music] after 2016

there was a continued increase in the number of jurisdictions that were using independent commissions

some of the ones in the bay area include berkeley oakland the city of santa clara

menlo park and martinez also the cities of sacramento san diego

santa barbara san diego and l.a counties use independent commissions as well so

there are a lot of comparators out there with different examples and advocates continue to push for

independent commissions particularly after this most recent redistricting cycle

san francisco's not alone in having some challenges and redistricting um and so

there are pushes in a few different counties where you know the public really felt that political considerations uh were playing a role

and that their communities weren't being kept together

and then oh just a note that due to the interest and appeal of independent commissions

there was actually a bill that passed in 2019 that would have uh required independent commissions in all counties

um but that was in all counties with more than 400 000 residents but that was vetoed so there's a little bit of a push

and pull in terms of how how many jurisdictions are actually making this shift

um and then an additional very significant reform came in 2019 and that's when the

fair maps act was passed uh so before that california law

regulating redistricting was very spare there was very little there

so there were um open optional criteria the only

mandatory criteria were population equality and compliance with the voting

rights act um and there were minimal criteria regarding public hearings there only had

to be one prior to the hearing at which a map was voted upon and so the fair maps act applies to

counties general lost cities and charter cities um and brought clear

ranked criteria to the line drawing process um perhaps i've mentioned this before but

the ranking can be really valuable because it sets respecting communities of interest

relatively high and puts that above things like having easily identifiable boundaries such as

the instinct perhaps to follow a highway which doesn't always serve community well

and also puts it above geographic compactness so that's now in the law that applies to redistricting all over

the state however charter cities if they set their own criteria um even if it's very

limited criteria like in san francisco are exempted from that provision so that's something you could also look at

um and then there are some other components of the fair maps act that apply

regardless of if it's a charter city um that are meant to help ensure it's really a transparent process and one

that truly includes the community um by having robust outreach and having folks

from underrepresented groups from language minority groups hear that the process is happening and understand how

they can get involved and give comment so the fair maps that kind of takes both a substantive and a

procedural approach in trying to get fairer outcomes and outcomes that are

more responsive to community preference and needs um

as i mentioned the fair maps act overall does apply to charter cities like san francisco but they're the criteria issue

and then there are a couple other components that um that the charter city can um

set its own rules for such as the procedure if a deadline is missed which in fact did become relevant this time

around so there's a little nuance there but i think that the range criteria is the biggest thing

um so as you hopefully embark on further

investigation of this i think it's really helpful to just kind of ground yourselves in

um why we're using independent commissions why san francisco would want to use its

independent commission um so i like to think of it in four pieces

increased participation by the public increased transparency

less a less political process and then finally more representative districts so as you're going through all

the all the pieces of things you might change or adjust in this process

how does it how does it serve those goals like how does it fit with the the true purpose of the commission

which is to have fair lines at the end of the day um and i appreciate that thought and care

went into creating the sf redistricting task force a couple decades ago but i think there

are a lot of lessons um and it's worth the time to to do additional inquiry

into other ways to handle this um as i mentioned one of those things could be looking at the criteria um also some of

you mentioned earlier some there are some structural pieces around the appointment process that you may want to

look at um the idea of randomized drawings came up that's a very popular approach in

other jurisdictions and is modeled on the state the state's approach um

and then the conflict of interest rules i mentioned but there's there's more that's just an initial list for you all

um and i i do want to say there are some pieces that kind of span uh structural

and operational and i hope you can look at those too for example the timeline mentioned the timeline issue you

mentioned some of that is set out in the charter and then some of that is in choices that are made by the commission

once they're seated and so it would be great if your inquiry could look at both pieces some of the legal changes that

could be made as well as best practices that you might want to consider putting into law or

otherwise document for folks uh seven to eight years from now who are

endeavoring on a new version of this so um

that's all i have for now but i hope that you bring additional speakers in to talk about these topics and share

information and look forward to this conversation thank you

Further Redistricting Discussion

questions i have just one question um actually i have a small clarifying

question and then a larger question um you said that the

requirement um was or the legislation had was vetoed as in vetoed by the

governor yes okay and then um for the fair maps

act the ranked criteria what um charter cities have

employed ranked criteria and what has been the impact

i cannot give you a comprehensive list but we should we can uh follow up and

then i will say like oakland just across the bay does

use rain criteria that are either identical to are extremely similar to the fair map section criteria yeah and

we've been in touch with organizations who've been active in redistricting in different parts of the state and folks

generally feel like the criteria are helpful because it it gives some grounding when there are competing

interests and it's hard for the public and the line drawers to figure out how to deal with that and you'll have

competing interests anyway so if like within a criterion right between

cois etc so if you can reduce some of that um by having a ranked criterion

it's helpful absolutely yeah so that was it thank you yeah

yeah i have a few um questions the first two are

um briefer ones so um you might not know this off the top of your head but or maybe you mentioned it how many

approximately how many jurisdictions are using an independent i don't know that yeah

i'm roughly i can answer that it's about 15. yeah is

it 15 maybe california yeah how many of those are general law i think

that i think very few yeah yeah okay and then

and then um for the 2016 law are the general law jurisdictions allowed to um

impose things on top of the base requirements yeah okay

and then the last question is um do you know like are there

are there different like good government best practices like independent of the laws that have

been passed that might speak to some of the things we've listed that you know of

uh you mean in the long the chart from commissioners diane shapiro or the list

of the list of topics that yeah were discussed today yeah there are best practices there's a great report um from

2017 that does include a survey of all the different commissions in california

it's authored by nicholas hydorne would also be a good speaker

and it hasn't i haven't seen an updated version since then but it does have

an analysis of the kind of basic components as well as recommendations about

best practices and citations for different parts of the charters and code for various

jurisdictions so you can see how they approached it is that from an organization or just a medicine individual he was affiliated with common

cause yeah all right thank you

not so much a question but i think that three kind of goals you outlined which were

great are kind of increasing transparency making it a less political process and you know increasing

representation uh through the district so i think that's good for us as kind of

guide posts and i guess i'm just interested over the this process

understanding kind of what especially the making it a less political process and

increasing representation kind of how that would look as far as actual kind of concrete things we can do i

think transparency makes is probably a little bit easier but i'm just i'm like i'm looking forward to

kind of hearing you know what this commission thinks and and what your kind of recommendations are on those points i know that's not

the purpose of this meeting but it stood out to me that those are good kind of guideposts for us to be thinking about

and she had a fourth one which oh you did be the fourth one increasing participation ah all right engagement

right perfect yeah um [Music] thank you so much are there other questions the other commissioners had

well i was wondering if i could actually ask one question from the previous speaker if

that yeah um yeah mr hill i was wondering if you

could describe how was the um the charter amendment that constructed the current task force who drafted that was

that an outside group or which which one the charter amendment that

created the um the task force the redistricting task force yeah um

it was proposition e was put on the ballot by the board of supervisors yeah and i was wondering if you could

just talk a little bit were you involved in that drafting at all or a little bit yeah do you know um like looking back do

you recall some of the like conversations they were having back then that might be specific to san

francisco or like certain things that you know some of these different knobs they were trying to turn

in terms of how to construct the task force that might help us

today in terms of um all right i'm getting confused you're talking about the redistricting task force not your commission so proposition

e was your commission reduced new task force was set up by proposition g in 1996. so the goal there was to have

uh uh diverse appointing authorities mayor board of supervisors and the

registrar voters each would have three so that would that that was not fair controversial

um to have that kind of structure was fairly common uh in places that were doing re

redistricting task forces like this to have different appointing authorities

so that i don't remember that being a whole lot of discussion uh except that

as i said they did put in there when an elections commission is created then

the registrar voters appointing authority would pass to the elections commission

okay but and then anything else about the structure of the redistricting task force that you can remember that might

have been no i mean at the time you know these things were not as common as they are now okay so um i think that

you know everyone knew that if san francisco was going to go back to

district elections it had district elections in the late 70s and it was gotten rid of as a result of the

assassination of mayor moscone and supervisor harvey milk

and that led to a huge effort to get rid of districts because it was blamed on electing dan

white kind of crazy logic but that's just what was going on at the time and so um

the they knew when they were trying to bring it back in the 90s that

you know it had to be some sort of pointing authority that created a separation of powers

uh you couldn't have one entity doing it but you know at the time they didn't really know about things like randomly

selected draws and um you know uh different ways of of even

trying to potentially elect uh elections task force or redistricting task force members i mean there's

there's different ways of doing it today that i think you know you you might think about and consult with groups like

uh like like hers that is that are doing these sorts of work um common cause also is still very involved

in this um and so you know i think it's worth

just doing a little bit of check to see is is the current structure of three because you know with the mayor doing

three the board of doing three you basically have six who are inherently probably going to be somewhat political

so it really makes your three appointments um you know extremely important and

from what i've heard you had like very few applicants um you know the city of l.a had like 700

applicants to its elect its redistricting task force and here i i think you have like what just 35 how

many 35 right 35. so you know and and were those uh with

those coming from a diverse group what kind of outreach did you use to get information out to different

organizations to let them know that you know how important this is and it just kind of crept up on people's my

sense um so they didn't really come to you with a lot of applicants so that's kind of outreach is certainly

important but you know even there is it does it makes sense to have the mayor having three and the board of

supervisors having three when um you know they're going to be inherently political and some people

believe that you can't remove the politics from redistricting so don't even try and i you know i don't personally

particularly agree with that um because we have so much more data now and things like citizens assemblies and and how you

actually can i mean the country of chile right now is going through a um a constitutional convention

in which they drafted hundreds of different uh delegates and um the the major parties there have you

know only a handful of delegates most of them are non-partisan independent delegates to over two-thirds of them

and it was because they put effort into how they selected those delegates and that they were picking hundreds of them

from all over the country i mean if you're only picking nine it seems like it you know you might be able to come up with a process that

um gets that even the the part the politics that you get from the mayor the board of

supervisors out of it and really has people who are going to come to it with the best of intentions instead of with

their um you know their own private agendas you know on cell phones with who knows who texting and calling to get their

orders that's what you want to avoid okay thank you okay

so um so i think uh uh julie you also mentioned miss marks that

uh you'd be coming out with another report is that right yes so um this year

advancing justice and common cause aclu and the league of women voters of

california are collaborating on a report looking at how local redistricting played out in california this past cycle

um it is more focused on the fair maps act than focused on independent

commissions but there should be some information that is relevant to you all so um we're hoping

that'll be out later this year so i hope it seems less

overwhelming there's a lot of data out there a lot of other jurisdictions that have

kind of leapfrogged san francisco because we were we were first

and we're kind of doing things the old way so

an example that i will give that mr hill mentioned is this idea of random

selection not having appointing authorities at all that was something that michigan

adopted they basically copied wholesale everything we did in california except the selection process because our

selection process in california is very very expensive and very very long

i think it results in highly qualified commissioners but it's very very expensive and very very long it also

favors more educated people uh and michigan decided

if it was good enough for greece it's good enough for for us and they did random selection uh you still have to

apply but they they literally sent out invitations to

a certain percentage of anyone with a driver's license was invited to apply

and very minimal kind of other qualifications some weighting of the

pool but otherwise random selection and at least in one cycle it seems to have

worked really well

one thing i just want to make sure that is incorporated regardless of

the process is and i've not said this a few times um but is inviting the communities who

came and spoke to us um in our initial first like in that special meeting that we've turned into

that very long meeting and then the second special meeting um i think it's really important that we

try and invite those specific communities to weigh in on a lot of that um and also just

not to nitpick but also the element of driver's license can also be somewhat oppressive um especially in a in a

city where homelessness is quite challenging in and of itself um many folks don't have

access to driver's license so we i think it's important to have whether it's that and not that we would adopt that

specific policy but i think being able to hear from those communities on whatever

we're discussing here um is something that we actively seek out

as a part of this initiative rather than it just being our small commission and

some wonderful subject matter experts i think the public inviting the public needs to be something we really invest

in so uh so what's before us is a

an initiative um that you know should we take this on and go for it as mr hill

suggested you know we

you know can tackle this we can along with the public learn about

what's going on in other jurisdictions and see you know what would be best for san

francisco um as someone who has done a ton of public speaking on independent

redistricting commissions all over the place i've seen many different variations and

you know one size does not fit all um you know california's process worked

really well for california and it was you know too fancy for michigan in some

ways right and other places don't have the same diversity we have here um there are things that are unique to

san francisco um that you know that came up in this last

redistricting cycle uh that that we could be very specific about for example the issue of splitting

cultural districts you know are there certain defined communities of interest

that you know would want to be called out for example so um

so i would be excited to embark on this um there are a ton of experts that we can hear from and learn

from so i don't think this is like a building from scratch at all i think we've had

decades of experience with this now um and our own experience in san francisco

and it's a matter of making it better yep thank you i guess

as far as kind of next steps my understanding is that we actually we

don't have any action to take in this meeting we probably won't for a while because we'll just

have it on the agenda and it'll be an item that we tackle with but i i mean

i don't think there is a i don't think we have to resolve to approve a plan i think i see

that as a living document that will kind of evolve over time and i i don't think we need to have a

resolution to continue with this work i think it'll just be an agenda item we continue to work on

unless i'm unless commissioners see that differently

if we're all in agreement that we want to take this on i'm sure commissioner shapiro and i can

kind of uh work on a plan for the next meeting and the next meeting and work on some

speakers um i would love to hear feedback if there are particular speakers you'd like to

hear from so that we can recruit them and have them lined up for us

can we also invite the our special guests to provide

recommendations on speakers that you would recommend i know as marks you had recommended someone but if there are

others that you recommend we include um obviously i've now said probably 10

times that i want to include the communities that came so if i think miss mark i don't know if you

have connection with those communities but being able to potentially chat with commissioner dye and myself about how to invite those

groups to come and participate in the process that would be great

yeah my own thought is that we would actually uh have some special hearings that when we get to a point where we might

have opinions and want to make recommendations that that we would invite

the public to a special session that where we just focus on this uh and take input

yeah i agree when we get to that point we might consider convening a beaufec meeting um

to if that is an especially long meeting

depending on how that's going to look and how many members of the public i think might make sense to do that as kind of a

special subcommission but our subcommittee but we can think about how that looks when we get to that

point i think your point's well taken of kind of what if what is the goal for the next

meeting and so and and i hope you know as we choose to continue moving forward

with this meeting to meeting hopefully there will be times when it's not all on on you commissioner dyan you commissioner

shapiro and we can kind of take turns or there will be pieces that can be moved forward by

other commissioners but i guess as far as the next meeting what do you see is kind of the goal how do we

we've kind of gotten the historical background thankfully from our our speakers today kind of what is the next

piece of the puzzle to start building out the direction that we go in um

i think it might be useful to

hear about a selection of other local commissions perhaps in the bay area

and what their structures look like just to to give us some ideas of what what these

other animals look like [Music] and i'm thinking common cause would be

the best organization to since they were behind a lot of this legislation uh to

maybe showcase that for us and just what did oakland do what did berkeley do you know what what did their independent

commissions look like and how are they structured and how are they if i could compare and contrast with san francisco

just uh so almost kind of like your chart using that a little yeah i think that's that's

a great kind of next step and then maybe we can then i'm just thinking out loud now and then

we could dig into the each of the chunks and kind of yeah after we have a couple

of examples to look at let's dig into the specifics of each one of those what do you think i again would like to

incorporate the communities to weigh in on what they find most important rather than us determining that based on just

another city i think it's important other cities so perhaps we can

[Music] also ask ms marks and any of the relationships

that she has with community leaders to just um support us in that outreach so that

they know that these conversations are even happening and can provide public comment because i don't think it should

be on just the commission to decide what is worthy of discussion and not it

should be that the public as well i've also informally i posted a public

comment to the redistricting task force and let them know that we are discussing this and

invited them to participate because having gone through the cycle themselves

you know in addition to their written report which i don't know if any of you read but um

multiple written reports from various of the registry task force members i think are interesting they they

had some recommendations themselves already and

perhaps you could include those as agenda items for next time as well that's a great idea in the packet at

least yeah the other thing that i think i would do just kind of to get us going

is there was a report in addition to the report that ms marx mentioned there was

a report um that was published by the uh the crc itself

which is probably less useful than the one that the league of women voters

commissioned to kind of assess the inaugural crc

so that might be we can put some of these packet items together for background reading and we will try to

get it up early uh since some of them are a bit long just because there are assessment

reports that that were done i don't know if michigan has done a similar assessment report but i

can find out so that might just kind of get us rolling

yeah no i i think i'm starting to kind of think about how other options look like and and

people's experiences with those is a good next step in a logical next step

all right okay um so

i think what that means is uh when we get to item 10 on the agenda we'll be talking

about this being the on the next agenda and kind of we we have an understanding

of where it's going so unless there's any other comments um from the commission i think we're going

to go to public comment okay so we do have more follower on the line okay

mr pal paul you're on muted uh it's david pillpal i had to move to

the phone i had to reboot the computer because the mouse froze so i can't actually get to my uh notes right this

second perhaps i can get back in in a second i do recall um

what what can i recall i'm sorry i'm getting a little uh loopier than usual hard to tell um

i did serve on the redistricting task force 10 years ago in the city as an appointee of this commission and had

that uh experience which i've talked about a little bit before and i'd be happy to present at greater length with

a little more more coherent uh thought uh at a future meeting uh i also uh

participated extensively with uh this past um redistricting task force which i

agree um was sort of less than in terms of

usefulness uh from my uh perspective despite all the good intentions and lots of effort uh that went on uh seen and

unseen uh i appreciate the two speakers uh tonight and i um and their uh

perspectives um which really did uh help put this uh in context um i also appreciate the

work that uh commissioners dai and um shapiro put into uh their work here i

to share the concern that um uh president can i just

call her president chap well at this point um uh shared about uh i i don't

know that it was discussed as a scope creep but that the scope be

you know carefully structured um so that you're not taking on everything and not

assuming a greater role than this uh commission has i do recall

from my notes that uh this would require a charter amendment to change um the the

big structural pieces and it might be useful if someone determined if there was uh some interest at the board of

supervisors to carry a charter amendment in the future to effect

whatever changes the commission might be mulling over if nobody's interested in

the topic then this might not be a good use of the commission's limited

time but speaking of which the commission has a secretary with limited hours and

although this would require a fair amount of time by the commissioners it would also

require some amount of commission secretary's time so just about

all of those things and ignoring the call wait um i i can uh i can come back uh in a

moment if i can be more coherent i'm sorry oh let me see if i can get my notes to open up um why don't i prefer

to see if there are other members of the public to talk thanks for listening and we just ran out

of time how's that for timing thanks thank you thank you mr popo

okay would you have one other color on the line you are unmuted let's

say um thank you um hi does this jen say with the legal and voters of san

francisco i just want to call to thank you um to thank the elections commission uh stephen hill and julia march you're

giving such a great presentation for having such a really thoughtful discussion about this process um i think as mentioned before by lauren

from a previous meeting that you know we'll continue to our um monitor process in the meeting and um

and you know just apologize that we weren't able to give input at um this meeting due to our busy schedules

then to thank you to uh commissioner guy for reaching out to us um one thing i want to bring up is that i

think something i was brought up earlier i think um commissioner bernholtz asked about the sunshine ordnance task force

and um them discussing the redistricting task force um at the previous meeting it

was actually cancelled so they because um the agenda

had a wrong webex link so they chose to actually cancel the meeting um that right then and there and

they decided so so they haven't actually discussed anything around this at the previous meeting and we'll discuss it at

the next meeting um other than that um i really do um like the suggestion about reaching out

to common cause california i think for the uh fertilizers have

we definitely reach out to them a lot around you know asking them different examples of other jurisdictions i

definitely asked them a lot about how la and san diego both the city and the commission and the

sorry the county uh redistricting commissions and how they operated and i think those are really good guide posts

for how we gave public comments for um what how the san francisco redistricting

task force should move forward um anyways um thank you again and have a

good night thank you

martha are there any other colors no we don't have any other colors on the line i i see there's one hand up that was mr

joe fell and he was already able to comment all right um okay so

we are closing out item number seven we're moving on to item number eight the director's report

8. Director’s Report

discussion and possible action regarding the director's part uh director arts thank you for your patience

i'll get over to you okay thank you sir uh so i just add to the report i'm not

going to comment on anything in the report but uh so we're almost done with this election i'll probably i'll certify next

week the next steps are we'll do what's called the one percent manual tally that's where actually do a hand count of

of the number of ballots equals one percent of the for the polling place and and put by mail ballots it'll happen

tomorrow at our warehouse and pier 31. we're also beginning we will begin the process of redacting personal

information from the ballot images because we post about images on our website so people can actually see what

how votes were cast in san francisco so we have to redact the personally identifying information

and then we'll try to get that posted when i when i certify next week and uh

that's about it really if i could take any questions on my report or anything else i guess

uh i'll open it up any questions from the commissioners yeah for a couple

um so thank you for your report um on the curing i what percentage of

voters do are you able to usually reach for the curing for the vote by mail it

i have not actually have not i've not done any review of the percentage

but i i can't say it depends on the election like the the november 2020 election had a higher period rate than

did this past election uh but i'll have to go back and look i've i've never actually tried to

discern a percentage i mean curious like is it you know like just in terms of able to contact them is

it like 10 or 50 or so you can you can get back to us at the next meeting well we contact everybody so it's a matter if

we can't do everyone will receive a hard copy notice in the mail we will actually we'll be mail hard copy notes and most

of them i'm assuming we'll receive it then it's it's a matter if we have valid phone and email ad

phone number and email addresses because we'll send a hard copy then if we have a phone number we'll call an email address

we also send an email but everyone is notified okay okay then i guess yeah the percentage that

that they're able to cure and then on the my last question is um

there's like the budget proceedings are starting now and i guess you could tell us what happened at the meeting you're at but i

noticed there's it says that there are three positions that are vacant

and then it also said something about p c s p e x and t e x i was wondering

you could um like number one say what the three positions are in the number two what are those abbreviations

so the three vacant positions there's a deputy director position that's vacant and that's been used for what's called

attrition savings for the past three years we had been in the process of uh filling it

because we had to get go through a process with the mayor's office in dhr then the pandemic and that all just stalled so we have to come back to that

the second position is a uh 1842 it's a management assistant position

and that's that would be someone that would be working in the admin on procurement and budgeting and contracting and also

someone that would be involved in these kinds of special projects like voting system implementation or if we were to

move to the voting borders choice act for instance that position would be involved that sort of work another one

is a it's a programmer's position and i i want to say 10.62

but it's it was a programmer's position that became vacant just prior to the april election special election

and the pcs was permanent civil service tex is temporary exempt and pex is

permanent exempt okay okay and then yeah and then the budget hearing was there any report back on

that no today was the easy one because they were just like a general presentation overview of the budget and

any questions that the the supervisors had on on on the on the budget

itself and the positions was something that a lot of departments had questions on i received no questions at all on the

budget i did receive a question uh from uh supervisor chan

about uh if there's been any change in in process now that volvo's receiving about in the

mail and then president walton also asked me if there would be any if the current

budget or the proposed budget would cover the costs associated with the pilot program that would happen next

year so the two questions i had i see then what was your answer to that second

question so so yeah right based on the scope of the pilot program that's been that's gone through the board has been

approved uh the vendor's already indicated that it'll provide the the resources and

personnel without charge as there's no cost to the city for on that side that on the

department side just due to the scope of the of the current version of the program if

it were to change then my answer might change uh then we would just fold whatever costs that were associated with

the program into our current budget so okay great thank you very much

um i have a question about the election plan as well and just kind of the

process of counting um mostly because i personally was confused as a voter and assume there are other

voters who may have also been confused and also just the national

media that was focused on this election and so i wanted to understand

how the department is educating the public and the media about vote by mail differences and the

counting of ballots so for example you know the press release on the i

think the 10 uh eighth um said there were still a hundred thousand ballots that had

um that are likely to be counted and therefore i think only 127 20 some odd

um ballots had thus been counted from election day but when you looked at the top of the website it said a hundred

percent of precincts counted and so i'm curious with and and i know in um vice president

uh jardonic's questions pertaining to numbers of how people are voting now i

think is going to be really helpful but knowing that everyone's getting a ballot in the mail and many people are dropping

off their ballots there may be implications around

election results that the public should understand differently than in the past and so i wanted to understand

how your department is talking about this and repositioning

itself based on the different forms of voting

so the only change that really has happened is that we get more ballots on election day

that also since voters are all the voters are receiving ballots in the mail we we stop processing the day before

election day and we send out lists to the poll to the polling places indicating who's voted already

now that allows anyone who shows up to a polling place without their ballot that they can receive a regular ballot and put the tag later

but what that does is that stalls our process for a day so we don't issue a report on wednesday the day after

election day but other than that nothing else has changed as far as our process is concerned

and so when we issue press releases i indicate that there will be no no results report on the wednesday

i think also on our website there's the the we have a schedule of releasing results

so we indicate that there will be no results report on on wednesday but no we're not

so other than that that one change there's nothing different as far as the media and the public is concerned

so just so i understand so the ballots that are counted that first round would

incorporate the ballots that are simply that are people

simply cast on election day not necessarily incorporating all of the vote by mail ballots that

have either been sent in and or dropped off on election day

correct so the the first report every every election is the vote by mail ballots prior to election day

and we make that clear in all of our materials that that hasn't changed that's that's been consistent for a long

time but just as you said so then the the uh election day results that those are the

the polling place vote those are the the votes from the polling places and that hasn't changed either

as far as reporting is concerned so there's been no change the numbers are less they have been less

as far as in-person voting is concerned the last several elections since november 2020 but the process hasn't

changed until sorry so you said the first round of ballots that are counted are the vote by mails that are sent in

prior to the election right interesting um because

i actually had spoken with a just member of the public who asked me why their ballot hadn't yet been counted when they

voted ahead of election day so i was and i actually didn't know the answer um and so

i mean i don't know what their specific experience is so it's the first the first chunk is the vote by mail prior to

the election the second is just those who come in to cast a ballot on election day not necessarily their mail-in ballot

drop-offs so the third is those that come in by mail after election day in addition

to those who used vote by malik mail ballots that were dropped off on election day is that correct

right but the first report and is issued election night right the second report

is issued election night the second and third reports include the polling place votes

and then the subsequent the suspect reports the reports that we have immediately after election they include

the vote by mail bouts that were received but then after we get through the vote by mail ballots usually around the

weekend after election day they start to bring the provisional ballots into the account and provisional ballots are people went

to a polling place so so the polling place ballots come back into the count so they're not the

polling place votes is not done on election day yes because of the provisional ballots

but provisional ballots are only a small percentage they are now because of the the will but also not because how we change the

process if we had not changed our process to send the lift if we voted already we would still be receiving 20

000 provisionals potentially at a high turnout election but now we receive just a few thousand so

for example if we're looking at the end of day on wednesday

and you're thinking about these kind of three or three and a half four chunks of

phases that are really incorporated now in the process

what percentage of ballots are being counted

through that wednesday of the election day so meaning the election there is no there is no set number and it depends on

what we received and the number of cards yeah because if we get a five card ballot we count less

going into election day than we do with a one two three card ballot so there's no set percentage i think it would be

helpful and i know um vice president jordanic included some of this in the number in the percentages that will be

helpful for elections moving forward to understand when people are voting like

on the aggregate so that we can better explain because if you look at the way

that the media especially in the in california in san francisco and in the

in the national news looked at what happened in san francisco it was a complete in my perspective a

misunderstanding of actually what was happening in terms of the counting because there was a

there were large generalizations made that were not actually before many ballots had even been

counted and so i just want to make sure that we get a sense of that number so that we

can better educate the public on what that process looks like from a phased approach now that so many people

are using vote by mail ballots yeah and we do and i speak to the media throughout the entire election cycle

a lot of the media that's that's incorrectly reporting the percentage turnout the percentage spread for prop

age specifically i'd already spoken that day but they prefer to focus on not everything that i said and that's

very common yeah so i mean certainly we can do more i'm not against that but at the same time the media doesn't always

grab everything that you give them yeah absolutely and not just prop page prophecy i mean all the prepositions

that were on the ballot i think they're but prep h for sure was the one that cost that caught the most attention of

course um and that's great to hear i think it would just be helpful once we have those numbers um

that we will discuss to then maybe explore how to make it maybe you know as

me as a common voter looking at the website i found it confusing when it said 100 of precincts reported

that it didn't necessarily tell the full story unless you went to the press releases to see that still a hundred

thousand ballots were outstanding um and if you think about that that's like 45

percent of ballots ultimately because you had only counted at that point i think

129 000 um ballots so that's a pretty different story um so it's not necessarily in

a um a push it's more just something i want us

to continue to talk about so thank you speaking of the reporting

um so i think commissioner shapiro

makes a good point like uh for example i i checked my track my ballot

i haven't changed my behavior i now vote for use of vote by mail ballot and i

drop it off i dropped it off the day before the election and it looks like it was actually

counted on the ninth so two day kind of turnaround

um so if is that typical yeah so it just depends on the volume of

what we're receiving the ballots and when we would process the ballot so

but three would be typical then so you can say two to three i mean just given our typical ballot sizes and everything

this was a three-card ballot sometimes it's five what do you think is typical for

like if someone drops it off does it take n plus two and plus three

yeah usually within two days someone's going to get a no but again it's part of its volume and timing yeah uh but uh

three days would be probably a long time for us not to process the ballot and depends you know

where it was dropped off if you're up in a dropbox or i dropped it in a dropbox and one of the official drop boxes yeah

it depends so if we picked it it depends when you when it gets dropped off when we picked it up where we are in the

schedule processing if we're different depositing for election day when you know so we haven't had a chance to

process your value so just they're just the very there's a lot of variable a lot of factors but three days would be a

long time for us not to provide any sort of information so it's just saying you know as a voter information thing just

saying it may you know when once you drop it off the dropbox we pick it up but it may take us up to three days

to process it but it will be counted yeah but i was checking right i was checking like okay i saw that it was picked up now you know

i just like i'm very interested and of course um it's a lot more relevant now that i'm on this commission but i think

that kind of messaging just to let people know if you drop your you know ballot off in a dropbox

it may take two to three days to count but that's a good point yeah yeah right just so people have an idea of what to

expect because i think you know there was a lot of media reporting and that may be what commissioner shapiro was uh referring to

saying this is oh this is a really low turnout election it was exactly 28 or whatever but

it was inaccurate because just a lot of it hadn't been processed yet it's actually was a pretty high turnout for a

you know exam between election right so yeah but then when those articles

came out only yeah certainly 50 or a little bit more than fifty percent of ballots had even yeah they were

reporting really low turnout it was like 28 or something like that i thought wow that really is low and then

it wasn't low at the end by the time all the ballots got counted um

another question on the on the uh results page on the website there are districts where

they're obviously east bay you know uh contests is that just because of old numbering is like legacy

or why is it showing no because when the there's census blocks on angel island

and also on alameda island that are assigned to san francisco and we had a precinct in on hollywood

island the last 10 years but from the from the previous of redistributing statewide registering so

but all the uh drafts maps and shape files that we received

did not have that precinct in alameda island but then when when the final maps and shape files

were issued and the state drew the information into the statewide database

and the state wanted to vary and we we had we had not received the final because the state distributes the final

lines and shape files so we were using the draft information and we didn't know we thought that the statewide

registration commission had remedied us having a pulling a precinct

on alameda island which is on an uninhabited little chunk of albany island but not only did we did we retain that

little chunk of down the island we gained a census block on angel island but

everything that we received didn't the lines were actually around

that that chunk in angel island also on alameda island and the shape files also indicated the same

so we don't know we don't know we don't know what happened but now we have an extra empty

precinct that will never have a voter in it and we have but because the state

has to report all the districts and all the precincts in the districts and the system is hardwired to to report all

that information even though we have no registered voters in those precincts in those districts and we never will and

we'll never have any votes cast in those precincts we still have to include them in our reports and that's why you're

seeing that okay that's that's interesting so just

so i know that we drew when we drew the first crc drew the districts we

tried we were required to abide by city boundaries which are weird right and our include uninhabited

islands for example but i saw um districts reporting with

the zero zero zero for east bay contests for example

and that's what i didn't understand because i i wouldn't think that any of the san francisco districts would have

included any of the of the east bay right that's where that chunk of albany island comes from right okay it's one

block one census block in alameda island but angel island is part of san francisco right

uh i think it's marin everything everything else because that because the the census block is assigned to

districts that have vote have uh votes reported in marin marin county

so it's just that it's just literally like a few hun a few hundred yards probably of angel island and i don't i don't we

don't understand it but it and we thought it had been remedied so we didn't expect this we if we expected anything it would just be an extra

block on alameda island like the previous issue would continue but then we added angel island and so that was

our surprise so yeah that's that's why okay

um did have another question which uh is escaping me at the moment see if anyone

else has a question yeah i just want to ask a follow-up on

the the issue of like the percentage of ballots that are counted on election night because this is something that's

come up frequently like i think it happened in the mayor's race the special election it was very widely reported that the

turnout was so low and then like a couple weeks later it was like one of the highest turnouts

you know historically and then i'm wondering but on the results page it shows you

know x percentage of precincts reported and it kind of makes it look like you have 100 of the voters so i'm

wondering is there um is there any way that you could have like a percentage of

estimated percentage of ballots that have been counted like if you

can um sort of like estimate based on how many vocal male ballots have come in or at least

flagged to people that hey you know on the results page that even though it says 100 of precincts it

could only be 55 of the ballots you know so people don't have that perception yeah and the

summary page is that something that we can change because that's that's something that we can format but a lot

but the with other reports are hardwired from from the system we can't change those uh in the precincts again that's just

polling places it's not it's not anything it's not vote by mail ballots it's just the votes from the polling places you know we we really can on

election night we don't know how many votes are coming back to us until the next day so on election night we can't

indicate the percentage of votes still to be counted because we don't know ourselves

can you at least include a disclaimer that says once we know x percent you know if it says 100 percent of precincts

counted what does that actually mean that means like those who voted on election day at poll sites whereas let's

say 70 percent of folks of voters actually vote by mail at least

then people understand that if it says 100 of precincts counted that's just

potentially thirty percent of total ballots yeah we can certainly put more messaging

on our site yeah i mean ninety percent of people vote by mail maybe we don't know we don't have no we do know right it's like ninety

percent right it depends on the election with this election wasn't it like 90 percent i don't know the breakdown it

might have been higher than 90 percent yeah i think it was 90 plus percent so so i

think um just changing when you say precincts reported simply says just say

in person voting on election day you know in person voting on election

day and then it'll become really obvious the vote by mail you know

and you can say vote by mail typically is 80 plus percent of the vote yeah i would

i would hesitate to put percentage like that out there but we can we can certainly provide more explanation of

the process yeah we can look at that i think that would be helpful because i think that is no different than what happened in the

presidential election where you know it was like it seemed like the vote flipped it's like well no we're

just counting the stuff that's coming in by mail right now so you know you would think we would know this better because

uh you know we've we have a high percentage of vote by mail i mean it was two-thirds

before now it's according to this last section election over 90

that's a pretty significant change even for san francisco so

so that way people know to kind of discount the the first report and kind of adjust their

expectations accordingly right so i think it purely is messaging it's just you know putting it in context for

people i think that would be really helpful

uh okay uh unless there's any other questions from the commission i think public comment we

have one caller on the line whoops

caller i'm unmuting you and you have three minutes to comment

oh there you go sorry you have three minutes to comment sorry it's david pilfer on multiple

platforms um let's see three topics uh without getting voted off the island

interesting discussion about uh redistricting's effects that might be a thing to add to the uh chart uh and

those future discussions is having you know at least a day towards the end

for the department to do a technical check to be sure that the

lines intended can be precincted and that there aren't you know sort of those technical weirdnesses

about creating zero uh voter precinct anyway i'll let you uh sort that out for the chart um i just

wanted to talk uh briefly about the june and november elections i think in

addition to your discussion just now about reporting and clarification around that um the sort of

highly unreported thing is that of the currently 228 915 ballots cast times

three cards is nearly three-quarters of a million cards all of which were run and counted

in less than a week and i believe accurately and i think that's

pretty amazing that the director and his staff working two shifts over the

weekend preparing organizing you know there's a lot of stuff that happens here and yes we can

boil it down to the numbers but the fact is you know this department operates

with great uh efficiency transparency accountability all the

things that you want and rather than putting out you know a number that's

fast we put out a number that's right and we want to get it right and so letting everyone vote who's

eligible to vote and counting counting accurately all the votes that were

legally cast is sort of the hallmark of their free and what's the third functional um

elections and and that's what we do day in day out so that's pretty great and then as to november um i

just did a quick look on uh candidates it looks like um one contest for

supervisor uh there was only one candidate uh two of them look

fairly that's district two looks like district 4 and 6 are going to be you

know contested and 8 and 10 have a contest but might not be as

contentious so there's that and we'll see how the rest of it plays out for november but you know once again i think

the department is doing a great job and um i continue to be supportive

thanks for listening thank you mr pilpel coming in with seven

seconds left always calibrated correctly um all right

9. Commissioners’ Reports

moving on to item number nine commissioners reports

discussion and possible action on commissioners reports on topics not covered by another item on this agenda

uh any commissioner's reports commissioner donald yes so i have three quick things

to report um the first is i attach to the agenda packet a document that the

cyber security and infrastructure security agency sent out earlier this month about the um

the security vulnerabilities that a researcher found in in a version of that imagecast

x and this is something that director arns covered in his report but um

but that's also included here under the reports

um secondly i included a document that of some numbers that i thought could be

useful for the commission to have access to for future elections and directorates i don't know of the ones that i listed

how many of them are would be easily obtainable for the current election

but um if any of those are maybe it would be great to see those at

the next meeting otherwise maybe for the november meeting we could

have some of those and these would just be it doesn't have to be by precinct or anything just

globally you know how many ballots are sent by dropbox and so on um and then

lastly for this election i did something a little bit different i voted using the

bell marking device using the audio functionality and um

i really just got a good sense of how that works with the dominion's bell marking device

i also did it at the last election too and i'll have some comments on on that experience

at the next meeting when we discuss the election so that's all

i just wanted to add a number that i wanted to add onto your um

your list whichever the attachment whatever it's called which is just about what we were

talking before about the percent before and on election day vote by mail

and um in person if we can have that level of granularity that would be awesome

um i just wanted to tap that on too um vice president jordanix list sorry

it's getting late i'm a little tired

i do have a couple of things i wanted to add if no one has something to attack on to his comments as well

for this agenda item oh go ahead yeah um so

i know we didn't have the chance to talk about the racial equity reporting um that is

something that i would like us to discuss uh moving forward and i'd also like to

discuss as a commission are our own racial equity and inclusion

it's just just sorry is this a commissioner reporter is this something where another agenda item because i i think i

apologize yeah it is sorry future agenda no no problem it's late it's don't worry

um okay uh did we take public comment on commissioner reports

no i could

on commissioner reports no uh i don't think so i see i just see a hand up okay

okay caller you have three minutes to comment okay david built out and i do this

without a timer just very briefly on uh commissioner

geodonix one-pager on election numbers i think as you talked through that earlier some of that um information could be

incorporated in the daily um director's press releases

if it's as to sort of ongoing status if it's sort of the look back of

how many you know in total how many used emergency voting you know was it free or

was it you know 400 000 probably closer to three um but maybe

some of those that that lend themselves to uh and after a total after election

report um could either be incorporated in a subsequent director's report or you

could have some discussion another time about how you evaluate the effectiveness of

the election plan and whether you're getting the right information not enough

information different information ways to uh analyze it you know some people are interested in the iris reports

they don't do a whole lot for me but um anyway that may be a topic for a future

discussion is what uh numbers and narrative are most helpful for the

commission to evaluate whether the election plan after the fact

um led to a you know three f election um or not anyway that's just my thought at

this point i too am getting punchy so i will

great thank you mr popo okay um moving on to

10. Discussion and possible action regarding items for future agendas

are there anyone no other questions on the line great uh agenda item number 10 discussion and possible action regarding items for

future agendas i'm going to start because i have items that have been brought up

so we're going to add april 6 minutes that will be on their approval of those

um and we will get those posted with enough time for people to review um the annual

report for 2021 that was taken off of this agenda because we needed more time with it so that's going to go back on

for the next meeting um talking about vacancies for this

commission and potentially sending letters and what the content of those letters will be will be an agenda item

for a future meeting for the next meeting and then a

an item so typically traditionally the commission has taken a hiatus in the summer kind of skipping either july or

august meeting so i'm going to start by asking director arnst whether there's any sensitivities

on your end as far as timing whether there's a skipped meeting in july or august

would be the election plan so normally it's i think it's 68 right now

so that would be in september so that'll be cool

and then i'll just to the commission thoughts on taking a

uh skipping a month uh in the summer july or august i know we have a lot to accomplish but

thoughts on that is the question if we take both or either either

typically yeah sorry i'm just clarifying no no

um so i guess the question is you know we've kind of had relatively long meetings for the last i mean basically

since commissioner shapiro and i joined probably nothing to do with that's right um

you know by skipping a meeting that means we might have to be willing to do longer meetings to

to cover the items unless you feel like we don't have stuff to talk about if we're going to be putting redistricting

on the docket for the next few meetings that's going to be substantive so no

that's that will be substantive i think skipping one meeting in my mind doesn't mean we would double

up on the length in the meeting but um do you see it floor is my suggestion um

and humbly if you'd like to continue um the work on

um redistricting um that could also be taken up by a beaupac meeting right i agree

um and you can select or appoint new beaupac members since i think

most of them are gone now so we'll add that um

i don't i it has not happened in the past that skipping a meeting means we have a longer meeting and i think

redistricting we can handle in a couple different ways so if we are going to take a summer break preference for july

versus august for anyone on the commission the only preference i have is around the

future agenda item that i wanted to raise um which i do has think has a

little bit of timeliness though i don't i don't think there's gonna be that much

that changes so i would maybe lean more toward a july over august meetings having july okay

but but i also can go if everyone else cares about august i really don't care

commissioner bernholtz anything that's better for your schedule

uh not a strong preference but i would prefer to skip august

okay i'm hearing two votes for skipping august if we end up skipping one so

uh we'll keep that in mind and plan to have july

all right any other future agenda items that i've not

mentioned i feel very swayed

um yes um so i wanted to go back to my comment about racial equity which was

um miss uh mismentioned in a previous agenda item

um and there are a few key components of that that i want us to both revisit and explore the first being

the conversation around land acknowledgements um i'd love to

perhaps reach out to commissioner bernholtz to get a little bit more

insight into the previous conversations around that as i believe we talked about that a couple meetings

ago um and understand where that kind of ended um and then the second piece is

looking at um not only the racial equity report for

the elections department but also for our own commission in our potential

letter to the appointing authorities of our commission for the seats that are vacant

specifically the mayor's office and the school board though i know that seat's been vacant for quite a while um

i think we are i think we need to be

i think it's important to me that we as a commission consider our own

roles in whether or not we do represent the true public of san francisco and we did receive that feedback from

members of the public in multiple meetings um and so i'd like for us to just have a conversation around that

um and also talking about kind of the specific priorities around how we can

ensure that we're looking at policies from a racial equity lens as well

all right and into the agenda uh any other items yes so there is an item i mentioned at

the last meeting which was um having a topic about sole source contracts

and this is a there's a contract that the department signed last september

a little less than a year ago and um for a little bit less than two million

dollars and it's something that i don't think we really um

had a chance to discuss or i don't think it was listed in the budget or anything

like that so i just wanted to have an item on that contract and just

more generally about sole source contracts is there a timing sensitivity with that item

um well i guess not um i'm just trying to oh no

there's no time sensitivity no cool okay uh unless there's any other

items public comment sorry

i do we take public comment on this one i think so you do i oh i do see an

embrace wow

i'm still here david filter um so if you're making a list of things i would

um add to that review of the june election plan and at some point a

review of the november election plan which i'm sure has not yet been written

although maybe the director wrote it during the meeting tonight in his spare time um on

uh vice president chertonic's uh suggestion about sole source contracts uh perhaps the city attorney

could also give you some uh attention on the behested payments

legislation and how that now affects uh contracting in the city and with

departments you might want to incorporate that in the discussion and just finally i believe the commission

uh reviewed the director's performance uh in closed session a few months back i can't remember exactly when but i don't

recall that the commission secretary has been reviewed and i believe she's been

in office for more than a year and i think having an annual performance evaluation of your commission secretary

might be helpful for all concerned i'm not looking to get rid of anybody i just

think having a you know annual performance evaluation of your two appointees is

um a thing to do so those are my suggestions for the list thanks for listening

uh i don't think there's any other callers so it is 9 24 pm and this meeting is

adjourned thank you great job