San Francisco Weekly
Blowing It: How San
Francisco elections officials dropped the ball on instant runoff
voting
By Ron Russell In March 2002 local voters approved a system
of instant runoff voting that supporters and detractors alike
insisted would forever alter the way San Francisco chooses its
political leaders. Proposition A was supposed to change the rules of
the road for the city's political establishment, embodied by
outgoing Mayor Willie Brown and his anointed would-be successor,
Supervisor Gavin Newsom. By making a voter's second and third ballot
choices count for something, IRV (also known as ranked choice
voting) does away with runoff elections. In San Francisco, as
elsewhere, such elections are often marked by low voter turnout and,
according to conventional wisdom, are notorious for the ease with
which powerful interests are able to influence the outcome by
spending lots of money. Approved by 55 percent of the electorate
(and garnering even higher support in heavily minority precincts),
IRV was touted as giving the city's hopelessly fractious
progressives a shot at advancing a mayoral candidate who wouldn't
just be cannon fodder for the well-financed darling of downtown
business interests. Together with the passage of Proposition E in
November 2001 -- which wrested control of the scandal-plagued
Elections Department from the mayor and placed it under a newly
created Elections Commission -- instant runoff voting promised a sea
change in the city's politics. Yet in the 18 months since the
cutting-edge system became law, the ostensibly reformist commission
and the Elections Department, under a new and inexperienced
director, John Arntz, have dragged their feet, unable -- or, as some
critics insist, unwilling -- to roll out IRV. Arntz maintains that
the department has done "everything we can possibly do" to put IRV
into effect. And he suggests that much of the blame lies with the
company that supplies the city's voting machines, Election Systems
& Software, for not making needed equipment changes in time for
state officials to certify the machines for the upcoming mayor's
race. But IRV supporters remain unconvinced. And last month a
Superior Court judge chastised the city's bumbling elections
officials for failing to implement IRV. Judge James Warren
nonetheless ruled against a voter education group's demand that city
officials be forced to use instant runoff voting in November even if
they had to resort to counting ballots by hand. Although
acknowledging that elections officials have not complied with the
law, the judge said that to force them to do so at such a late date
might jeopardize the election. "It's a classic Catch-22," says
Steven Hill, who served as campaign manager for Prop. A and is a
senior analyst with the Maryland-based Center for Voting and
Democracy, which sued the city over IRV. "The fact that [elections
officials] couldn't be trusted to do in two months what they'd
failed to do in a year and a half becomes the rationale for letting
them off the hook in November." Hill's organization, chaired by
former independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson, is a
nonprofit research and advocacy group that aims to promote more
democratic voting systems. On the surface, the city's dismal
failure to get IRV up and running after so long would appear to be
-- at the very least -- a study in institutional ineptitude. Arntz,
38, who had been a midlevel employee at the Elections Department
with no previous experience overseeing elections, knew little about
instant runoff voting when he took over as acting director in April
2002 after the firing of his predecessor, Tammy Haygood. The last of
a string of directors chosen under a system dominated by the mayor,
Haygood had done little if anything to jump-start preparations for
IRV in the six weeks between Prop. A's passage and her ouster by the
commission. Facing a not-unexpected learning curve, not to mention
the urgency of preparing to stage an election last November, Arntz
(who wasn't named permanent director until May of this year) is
widely perceived as ignoring pleas from proponents to make IRV an
early priority. But if Arntz botched the system's timely enactment,
the slumbering role of the Elections Commission in failing to prod
him has fueled speculation that IRV's immobilization in bureaucratic
quicksand has as much to do with mayoral politics as with
garden-variety bungling. In fact, many IRV backers believe the
commission, presumably committed to the new voting system, conspired
with forces beholden to Brown -- and who want to see Newsom elected
mayor -- by dragging its feet until it was too late to deploy IRV in
this November's municipal election. Indeed, the evidence suggests
political mischief is at the root of the city's failure to make IRV
happen in November -- even if the mischief is a bit different than
some IRV backers suppose. With an understaffed and underfunded
Elections Department already relegated to the status of governmental
orphan, the commission failed to pursue a veteran elections official
to replace Haygood, instead placing the burden of jump-starting IRV
on the shoulders of a neophyte director who didn't even know the job
was his to keep during much of the past year. As a result, IRV's
chances of a timely rollout appear to have been doomed from the
start. But while political forces friendly to Brown and
front-runner Newsom did their utmost to torpedo IRV, their efforts
probably weren't necessary. The department's attempts to implement
IRV were so feeble as to be almost comical. From its humiliating
failure to get a signed contract with the voting machine vendor
until after the work of retrofitting machines to accommodate IRV
ballots was to be finished, to its hat-in-hand (not to mention
halfhearted) bid to get the state to certify an 11th-hour plan to
use the new voting method, the department seemed all but programmed
to fail with respect to IRV. Even IRV opponents think
something very strange has happened. "I'm not a fan of instant
runoff voting, but I do think it has been deliberately stalled,"
says activist Barbara Meskunas, who served on the Citizens Advisory
Committee on Elections, which preceded the commission's creation.
"Either that or they're asking us to believe that the Elections
Commission can't walk and chew gum at the same time."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Such speculation got a perhaps unintended boost from none
other than California's chief elections regulator, Secretary of
State Kevin Shelley, a former San Francisco supervisor and state
assemblyman who was a big booster of Prop. A during the campaign.
After his office refused in July to clear the way for IRV by
certifying a last-ditch plan to partially count ballots by hand if
necessary, angry backers accused Shelley of bowing to political
pressure to make sure instant runoff voting didn't happen in
November. "That's unmitigated bullshit, and you can quote me on
that," he later told a Chronicle interviewer. The secretary of
state's role was questioned after a review panel consisting of eight
of his underlings gave the appearance of having already made up its
mind in late July when it turned thumbs down on the hand-count
alternative. For supporters, the hearing in Sacramento had all the
trappings of a kangaroo court, with the reasons offered for the
plan's rejection seemingly less than substantial. It didn't help
that Shelley's staff waited until after 5 p.m. the Friday before the
Monday hearing to release its negative recommendations, making it
all but impossible for IRV supporters to respond, even as the state
findings served as fodder for news coverage over the weekend. In a
meeting with the Chronicle's editorial board a few days after the
hearing, Shelley dropped a bombshell. "I got calls from members of
the elections commission saying, 'We don't want this to happen,'" he
was quoted as saying. And in a sarcastic swipe at commissioners, he
added, "That sounds like a group of people really committed to the
will of the people." Shelley has since refused to revisit the
subject. After not responding to numerous requests for an interview
for more than three weeks, he did, however, authorize his spokesman,
Doug Stone, to tell SF Weekly that he stands by his remarks to the
Chronicle. Each of six elections commissioners interviewed for this
article denied contacting Shelley. The seventh, Robert Kenealey, did
not respond to interview requests. But it is by no means the first
time questions have arisen about the panel's collective commitment
to IRV. At a heavily attended City Hall meeting last month,
commission President Alix Rosenthal sat stone-faced as IRV advocate
Greg Kamin described her as having "scarcely concealed her disdain
for IRV personally" while addressing a Democratic group several
weeks earlier. Similarly, Caleb Kleppner of the Center for Voting
and Democracy tells SF Weekly that commission Vice President Michael
Mendelson expressed misgivings about instant runoff voting during a
personal conversation last year, something Mendelson denies. Until a
recent squabble in which Mendelson sought to have Rosenthal removed
as president, the two were allies often aligned against
commissioners Richard Shadoian and Tom Schulz, both vocal supporters
of IRV. Adding to the intrigue is that even as elections officials
fumbled IRV's implementation, forces linked to Brown and Newsom (who
both opposed Prop. A) worked to sink the new system before the Nov.
4 election to choose a mayor, district attorney, and sheriff. The
most detailed evidence of their efforts is a 106-page legal
challenge to the Elections Department's ability to hand-count
ballots during the city's too-little-too-late bid to get Shelley to
certify IRV in time for November. The document was prepared by two
heavy-hitting law firms with long ties to Brown and the downtown
business establishment -- Remcho, Johansen & Purcell in San
Leandro, and Pillsbury Winthrop, which has offices in San Francisco
and New York and employs more than 800 lawyers. The Remcho firm has
represented the state Legislature in redistricting matters and has
had extensive dealings with Brown, a former state Assembly speaker,
and numerous other local Democratic figures. When the firm's
founder, Joe Remcho, died in a helicopter crash in January, Brown
was a pallbearer at his funeral. Pillsbury Winthrop is a financial
contributor to the Committee on Jobs, which represents powerful
downtown interests and whose co-chair, financier Warren Hellman, is
a key Newsom supporter. Hellman co-founded S.F. SOS, the group that
last year worked with Newsom to advance his "Care Not Cash" homeless
initiative. The firms' clients in the anti-IRV drive included Mary
Jung, a member of the San Francisco County Democratic Central
Committee who has supported both Brown and Newsom, and David Lee,
who heads the Chinese American Voter Education Committee. Newsom's
campaign donated $5,000 to the nonpartisan CAVEC last year. In July,
CAVEC representatives urged Shelley to reject IRV, arguing that not
enough could be done to educate voters before November and that
minority voters therefore would be confused and effectively
disenfranchised. It's an argument also advanced by
two other clients of the law firms. One is a local chapter of the A.
Philip Randolph Institute, the national black trade unionist
organization. The other, which has taken a lead role in pressing the
case against IRV before the Elections Commission, is the California
Voting Rights Foundation. But IRV backers claim the foundation is
little more than a front for the Remcho law firm. And state records
appear to bear them out. Those documents reveal that attorney Tom
Willis, a Remcho partner, is the foundation's principal officer. Not
only that, but the foundation's address and phone number match those
of the law firm's San Leandro office.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Elections Commission was supposed to be the cure to
years of perceived mayoral meddling in the Elections Department.
Although snafus and alleged misconduct have long been part and
parcel of the city's checkered elections history (former Secretary
of State March Fong Eu proclaimed the department the state's "worst"
as far back as 1971), there has scarcely been anything to match the
turnover at the top since Brown became mayor. Before Arntz, the
beleaguered department had gone through five directors in as many
years, none of whom had ever run an elections operation, prompting
skeptics to question whether the department was deliberately
programmed for ineptitude. For years, the secretary of state's
office has kept an eye on San Francisco at election time as if it
were a banana republic needing a U.N. observer team. Yet confusion,
delay, and foul-ups have remained the order of the day. There was
the Elections Department's unusual -- not to mention illegal --
decision to open the polls in four housing projects on the weekend
before the vote on the 49ers stadium in 1997, a move that opponents
decried as a blatant attempt by Brown, who supported the measure, to
harvest votes from stadium-friendly neighborhoods. That same year,
the city's voter rolls were discovered to be larded with the names
of 1,800 dead people. A year earlier, the Elections Department
mistakenly sent double sets of absentee ballots to 1,000 voters,
giving them the chance to vote twice. After the November 2000
election, in which a public power measure narrowly lost,
thenSecretary of State Bill Jones deemed the department's
bungling of the vote count the most serious he had ever seen. Prop.
E promised to shake things up. It stripped control of the department
from the city administrator, a mayoral appointee, and placed it in
the hands of a commission that the measure's supporters saw as a
means to depoliticize the department. The initiative severely
limited the mayor's influence, giving him just one appointment to
the seven-member commission, the same as the Board of Supervisors,
the district attorney, the city attorney, the public defender, the
treasurer, and the school board. The measure endowed the commission
with both policy-making and oversight authority, including the
ability to hire and fire the department director. Within three
months of the panel's inaugural meeting in January 2002, Haygood --
the last director chosen under Brown's influence -- was toast. A
lawyer and engineer by training, she had served Brown previously on
a little-noticed commission to oversee new construction in Golden
Gate Park. Before being picked for the thankless job of running city
elections, her immediate claim to fame was that she had supervised
quality control for a company that makes diaper dispensers. Her
qualifications for the elections job seemed difficult to pinpoint.
Even the mayor's top aide, Bill Lee, was quoted as saying that what
sold him on Haygood was the detail with which she could describe how
a diaper is made. The irony is that, for the most part, Haygood was
credited with running a clean election in November 2001, her first
and last before being dumped. But all did not go well. Suspicions
were aroused when ballots were inexplicably moved from City Hall to
nearby Bill Graham Civic Auditorium late on election night.
Haygood's explanation was that there had been an anthrax scare. If
so, critics thought it odd that no one working near the ballots wore
gloves. The most damaging news, however, came weeks after the
election, when plastic lids for old ballot boxes floated ashore in
San Francisco Bay. The incident, which garnered widespread
headlines, quickly came to symbolize the woes of the bedeviled
Elections Department. But it was really a nonevent. The department
had ceased using the boxes to store ballots, but kept them as
containers for pens, notebooks, and other small office supplies.
After hosing the boxes down, a city worker had forgotten to bring
them in off a pier before going home for Thanksgiving, and over the
holiday weekend about two dozen lids blew into the bay. The biggest
knock on Haygood from her newly designated bosses at the commission
was that she had overspent the department's budget by more than $5
million without keeping them in the loop, something she vehemently
denied. Whether that was the reason for her being canned or the new
commission merely wanted to flex its muscle at the mayor's expense
may never be known. The commission didn't state a reason for
Haygood's dismissal. As the courts later affirmed during Haygood's
futile yearlong struggle to win her job back (while being paid her
$125,000 salary), it wasn't obliged to, since the director had not
yet served a year in the job and was still a probationary employee.
The Haygood affair cemented the animosity between Brown and the
commission, with serious repercussions for IRV. Having jettisoned
the mayor's elections director, the commission needed to ramp up
preparations for the November 2002 election and also faced the task
of jump-starting plans for a voting system that no one in the
department, least of all the commissioners, knew much about. Still,
Prop. A appeared to have cut them plenty of slack. Although it
encouraged a good-faith effort to install the new voting system in
time for last November's election, the measure gave elections
officials 20 months -- until the November 2003 election -- to get a
new IRV system up and running. Whether by blunder or design, the
elections panel was not up to the task. With help from Brown,
Haygood, who is black, kept the commission tied in knots for months,
claiming her dismissal was racially motivated and going to court to
try to overturn it. The mayor demanded (to no avail) the release of
tapes and documents from the closed-door session at which the panel
had voted to dismiss her. As commission President Rosenthal
acknowledges, "It took us about a year to get our sea legs." After
last November's election, presided over by Arntz, Brown fumed that
voters were turned away from polling places because not enough
ballots were available. The mayor, who viewed the commission's
creation as part of a power play by the progressive majority of the
Board of Supervisors, later ratcheted up his criticism, referring to
commissioners as "nitwits." After his first commission appointee
abruptly resigned in June 2002, Brown didn't bother to pick a
replacement until May of this year, finally naming the Rev. Arnold
Townsend to the post. The appointment came barely a
month after Brown is alleged to have told a private breakfast
gathering that if IRV were put in place it could result in a
candidate such as Supervisor Tom Ammiano being elected mayor. The
affable Townsend doesn't hide his misgivings about IRV, although he
insists that he and the mayor have never talked about it. But
neither is he shy about where his loyalties lie. "I had [an IRV
backer] say to me, 'The mayor just put you on [the commission] to
push his agenda,'" he says. "And my response to that is, 'Well, he
damn sure didn't put me on here to push yours.'"
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Under IRV, voters rank their top three candidates in order
of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of votes, the one
with the least support is eliminated and the No. 2 choices from his
or her ballots are credited to the respective candidates and the
totals recounted. The process is repeated until one candidate has
more than 50 percent of the vote. IRV thus functions like a rapid
series of runoff elections in which one candidate is eliminated each
step of the way, but without the need for an actual -- and costly --
runoff election. Supporters claim that IRV also eliminates
"spoiler" candidates. The presumption is that in multiple-candidate
races, like-minded constituencies, such as progressives, will divide
their votes among like-minded candidates, allowing a candidate with
less overall support but a solid plurality to prevail. The real
political ramifications, however, are largely unproven in the United
States. Although IRV has been used for years in Australia and parts
of Europe, in this country it has been confined mostly to corporate
and student elections. UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech are among
about two dozen colleges nationwide that use IRV to some extent to
elect student officers. Last year, Utah Republicans used it to
choose congressional nominees at the party's state convention, and
pro-IRV legislation is pending in about 20 other states. San
Francisco is the nation's largest political entity to adopt the
system. Whether IRV would have given one of the progressive mayoral
candidates a better shot at defeating front-runner Newsom this fall
or whether political consultants might simply have come up with new
strategies to blunt the system won't ever be known. Regardless, both
supporters and detractors appear to accept the assumptions about
IRV's ability to level the playing field. Against that backdrop, the
snail's pace of its ill-fated deployment -- and the new Elections
Commission's role in that -- was almost guaranteed to arouse
political suspicions. "IRV is the canary in the mine shaft that
points to a much deeper problem," says Hill of the Center for Voting
and Democracy. "And that's that the Elections Commission is asleep
at the wheel." He and others began to agitate for the commission to
gear up for IRV within days of the March 2002 vote. But as
interviews, commission minutes, and internal documents reveal, the
effort was tortured from the start. After keeping advocates at arm's
length for weeks, the commission didn't start talking in earnest
about IRV until May of last year. It wasn't until last September
that the panel finally turned to Hill and Kleppner, both nationally
recognized IRV experts, to help draw up an implementation plan. By
then it was too late for IRV to happen last November. Although
disappointed, advocates -- including grass-roots volunteers from the
Prop. A campaign, many of them affiliated with the Green Party and
the city's Democratic clubs -- took it in stride. After all, Arntz,
who by then had been named provisional director, sounded confident
that instant runoff voting was on track for this November. But
Arntz, with the commission's tacit approval, had already made a
crucial decision that would hugely affect IRV's chances of being put
in place in time to meet the law's November 2003 deadline. The
elections chief wanted to upgrade more than 600 Optech Eagles, the
photocopier-size optical scanners now used to count paper ballots at
the city's precincts, to accommodate IRV. To do so, additional
hardware needed to be installed to increase the machines' memory,
and new software devised to make the Eagles compatible with the new
voting system. But representatives of Election Systems &
Software, the city's voting machine vendor, concluded that it made
more sense to buy new touch-screen voting machines than to retrofit
all the Eagles. With a vested interest in seeing the transition to
IRV go smoothly, ES&S offered to cut the city a deal if it
converted to touch screens. Although the price tag could exceed $10
million, state funds had been set aside to help with the purchase,
and city officials had expressed their intention to adopt the more
technologically advanced touch-screen system, now in use by half a
dozen California counties. ES&S Regional Sales Vice President
Joe Taggard declined to talk about the matter for the record. But
sources familiar with the negotiations say the company argued that
the cost of upgrading the Eagles would be money badly spent if the
city later replaced them with touch screens. Yet Arntz stuck with
the Eagles, concluding that on top of gearing up for IRV, a switch
to touch screens would be too much, too soon, for his chronically
understaffed department to absorb, these sources say. Headquartered
in the City Hall basement, the Elections Department has long been a
stepchild of the municipal bureaucracy. It has only about a dozen
full-time permanent employees. About a dozen others, while assigned
full time to the department, actually are on long-term loan from
other city departments. Thus, there is little job security and
little continuity from one election cycle to the next. "It's a
thankless situation," says an ex-staffer who asked not to be
identified. "You never know from one year to the next, or one month
to the next, whether they're going to yank you and put you someplace
else, or whether you're going to be out of a job." As elections draw
close, the department depends on roughly 200 seasonal employees and,
at election time, an even larger number of volunteers. By last
October, with ES&S still trying to sell city officials on touch
screens, Arntz, again with the commission's backing, gave the vendor
an ultimatum: Either come up with a way of upgrading the Eagles, or
the city would put the project out to bid. The vendor reluctantly
agreed. But it was the beginning of a fiasco. Sources familiar with
the matter say the vendor suggested that it could do the upgrade for
$100,000 if, instead of modifying each of the hundreds of precinct
machines, it installed new software for two large-capacity
vote-counting computers at City Hall. The plan would have involved
physically transferring uncounted ballots from throughout San
Francisco to City Hall after the polls closed, something that Arntz
-- mindful of past problems -- preferred not to do. Both sides
agreed to sign an upgrade contract by Jan. 1. But with Arntz and the
department up to their elbows in conducting an election in the fall,
little got done. It wasn't until January that contract talks even
began. By then, ES&S had announced it would cost $1.6 million to
upgrade all the precinct machines. Yet inexplicably, the
negotiations languished. Michael Mendelson, who was then commission
president, spent February through April fending off pleas from IRV
supporters to finish dealing with the vendor so the city would have
something to submit to the state to be certified. Steven Hill says
that for two months he was told by one or another commissioner that
the contract "would be ready any day now. They kept saying, 'Next
week, next week.' But we've never gotten a straight answer as to
what the holdup was." The department came to terms with ES&S
only days before the pivotal July hearing at which the secretary of
state's office rejected the city's slapped-together plan to
partially count ballots by hand in the event the company couldn't
complete the upgrade in time. Even so, the city didn't have a signed
contract until August -- well past when the work was to have been
finished. ES&S had continued to work on the upgrade without a
contract, and its representatives insisted there would be no
impediment to putting IRV in place in November using the Optech
Eagles. Still, during the months that
contract negotiations slowed to a crawl, work had not progressed
sufficiently to meet the secretary of state's guidelines for advance
testing. Everybody -- the commission, Arntz, ES&S, and Shelley
-- blamed everybody else. But for angry IRV supporters, dozens of
whom had vented before the Elections Commission and at Shelley's
hearing, it felt like the end of a game in which the team with the
upper hand had run out the clock.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ From his résumé, it is hard to imagine a more improbable
big-city elections chief than John Arntz. Not only did the Detroit
native have no previous experience running elections, he had never
even worked in government. He started at the Elections Department in
October 1999 as a desk clerk answering phones and greeting the
public. Barely 2 1/2 years later, upon Haygood's dismissal, he was
running the place. It wasn't his first unlikely career turn. In
1996, after graduating from the University of South Dakota's law
school, Arntz eschewed the bar exam and returned to Alaska (where he
had earned a degree in English literature at the University of
Alaska) to be a carpenter. "I realized while in law school that
becoming a practicing attorney is something I didn't want to do," he
says. In 1998, he moved to the Bay Area, teaching computer classes
and freelancing for an online aviation magazine. He left a job
writing product descriptions for a vitamin company to join the
Elections Department. By all accounts, Arntz is a quick study.
"He's tireless, dedicated, and has the respect of those who work for
him," says former colleague Girard Gleason, who drafted Arntz to
help him supervise the printing of ballots for the March 2000
election. "There's no task he hasn't performed over there, including
lowly precinct work." Neither, say admirers, is he political. In
fact, by his own sheepish admission, San Francisco's top elections
official has failed to vote in the last five local elections. On a
rainy primary election night in March 2002, Gleason recalls driving
to a polling station in the garage of a Pacific Heights home to pick
up Arntz, who was poll sitting, after the volunteer who was supposed
to bring him back to City Hall failed to show. "There were two
[volunteer] workers with him. The first one bailed out before the
polls closed. The second one, whom I think came from a soup kitchen,
also threatened to bail. So John reaches in his pocket and hands him
$20 to get him to stay. That's the kind of guy he is." But others
express amazement at the degree to which the commission has followed
its rookie elections chief on IRV, adding to the perception that the
rollout's failure is due to more than mere bungling. "They defer to
him as if he were some veteran elections registrar," says Hill of
the Center for Voting and Democracy. "You've got to remember: He's
still learning the ropes and is a probationary employee." Even
Arntz's selection, conducted under the Elections Commission's
auspices, appears to have fit a familiar San Francisco pattern.
Touted as a national search, the process attracted only nine
applicants. Of the five who made the final cut, only Arntz and two
others passed a written exam. Not a single veteran elections
official was among the applicants for the job, with its advertised
salary of up to $144,000 per year. (A commission source says Arntz
earns about $140,000 annually.) "If the aim was to attract an
experienced registrar, that's not the way San Francisco went about
it," says Contra Costa County voter registrar Stephen Weir, who
served on a panel of experts that helped devise questions for the
exam. Weir and another experienced California registrar noted that
San Francisco personnel officials failed to employ an outside
headhunting firm to aggressively target talented prospective
applicants. "If you want to bring in someone with a high-caliber
track record -- and trust me, they are out there -- you don't wait
for them to come to you," says Weir. "You go after them." Instead,
he says, the city used its regular civil service testing process, as
if it were hiring a low-level employee such as a clerk.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ As time has ticked away for November, the commission
created by voters supposedly to erase political manipulation from
city elections has, besides appearing impotent, looked increasingly
political in its inaction. Since Prop. A's passage, the Elections
Commission has done little to advance IRV beyond passing a couple of
tepid resolutions -- one in March 2002 and another in August of this
year -- supporting instant runoff voting in principle. The latter
gesture, before a hearing room packed with IRV fans, was especially
uninspiring, after a motion by Commissioner Shadoian that called on
the panel to support putting the system in place by November failed
to muster a majority. Late last year, Tom Schulz, the panel's other
IRV champion, tried and failed to get a majority of commissioners to
adopt even a simple mission statement that called for them to hold
the Elections Department accountable for its performance. He and
Shadoian complain that Mendelson and Rosenthal have thwarted their
efforts to advance IRV. "The commission is a dysfunctional family
and, sadly, it appears to be that way by design," says Schulz, a
retired U.S. General Accounting Office investigator appointed to the
commission by the Board of Supervisors. Shadoian, the school board
appointee, offers a similar view. "We seem to be a commission that
doesn't know what our duties are," he says. But others see it
differently. "The department has been doing nothing but working on
[IRV]," insists current commission VP Mendelson, an attorney
appointed by DA Terence Hallinan. Although Prop. E gives the
commission oversight and policy-setting authority, Mendelson and
Rosenthal insist that the commission shouldn't inject itself into
the department's day-to-day operations. It's a view that the
commission majority has come to share in doing little to press for
IRV. "The law does say [implementation should occur by] November
2003, but if the director of the department comes back to us and
says he can't do it, then it's not for us to say he can," says
Commissioner Brenda Stowers, named to the panel by city Treasurer
Susan Leal. Rosenthal, a lawyer appointed by former Public Defender
Kimiko Burton, has become a lightning rod of criticism for IRV
backers since her misgivings about the new voting system became
publicly known. "I don't know that I can fight [the perception] no
matter what I do," she says, referring to accusations her panel has
stood in IRV's way. "I just have to be repeating that I'm here to
support John Arntz. My feelings about IRV have never been
particularly relevant." Meanwhile, Arntz -- staring at a
gubernatorial recall, a city election in November, and quite
possibly a December runoff of the kind IRV was intended to eliminate
-- even now doesn't sound reassuring about putting IRV into effect
in time for November 2004. "It's certainly our goal," he says. "But
there are still a lot of challenges." |