Reform races against time
Ranked-choice voting systems move toward approval as the deadline nears

By Steven T. Jones and Alex Posorske

With a looming deadline for deciding what kind of ballot San Francisco voters will see at the polls this fall, new developments in the effort to implement the voter-mandated ranked-choice voting system have been coming in at a brisk pace.

RCV moved closer to becoming a reality with the unanimous June 23 vote by the San Francisco Ethics Commission urging RCV's immediate implementation as a means of reducing ethically questionable independent expenditures in traditional runoff elections. Further action came when vendor Election Systems and Software turned over counting software to the Secretary of State's Office June 26, when federal officials signed off on implementing RCV June 30, and when the Secretary of State's Office set a July 28 hearing date for its Voting Systems Panel to approve the use of an RCV hand count if state approval for the computer system is denied or delayed.

On the negative side, in addition to existing time hurdles for RCV and opposition that pressed the secretary of state to deny the changeover to the new system (see "Who's Fighting Election Reform?," 7/2/03), supporters of mayoral hopeful Gavin Newsom on the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee have begun lobbying against the change.

Opposing RCV as "an untried and untested system with insufficient safeguards for discouraging fraud, reducing mistakes and ensuring that every San Franciscan's vote counts equally" in a letter to the Secretary of State's Office were a group that included Mayor Willie Brown, Assessor-Recorder Mabel Teng, and eight members of the DCCC.

As recently as March 26, the full DCCC has weighed in with a formal resolution asking that "the San Francisco Department of Elections use all available resources to ensure the professional and organized implementation of IRV [instant-runoff voting, by which RCV is also known] for the November 4, 2003 election." RCV supporters fear opponents will try to flip the DCCC's formal position during its July 23 meeting and then try to get the state party apparatus on board.

Meanwhile, at the July 2 meeting of the San Francisco Elections Commission, director of elections John Arntz announced the July 28 hearing of the Voting Systems Panel, which is important because of the mid-August deadline for ordering ballots. If no voting system has been certified by that time, Arntz and others have said, the city may have to hold a traditional runoff election in November or risk having no election at all.

Also at the hearing, Elections Commission president Alix Rosenthal formally asked City Attorney Dennis Herrera five specific questions relating to the city's responsibility to implement RCV if one or more systems of vote counting are not approved by the Secretary of State's Office in time for the November election and whether the city is legally able to plan for a traditional election even though the voters mandated RCV in 2002.

Proponents of RCV have been asking Herrera to wade into the RCV fight for weeks now and give some idea of where the city stands legally. Herrera's office didn't directly address a Bay Guardian question about the matter several weeks ago, but he did say the city could develop contingency plans in case RCV isn't ready, thus leaving the impression that traditional runoff elections can still legally be held. But Rosenthal's questions ask for much more specific answers and guidance on the matter. Rosenthal said Herrera's answers are expected by the commission's next meeting July 16 and are to be public documents not subject to any attorney-client privilege rules.

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