Tim, my understanding is that state law precludes counting any ballots before polls close on election day. This includes VMBs and provisionals..

Good luck getting DTIS to let you through the City's network via wireless in public areas.

And, seriously, where are the consequences placed on Calvin Welch, Sue Lee supporter, Sue Hestor, Eric Quezada and Rene Cazenave on their utter failure on their Quezada/Prop B debacle? These are the people who are getting paid cash money to move the agenda on this and who have failed utterly to do so.

These people have exhausted their franchise and no longer deserve to get paid to advocate for affordable housing in San Francisco as their 1970s politics are based in a reality that no longer holds. Their wisdom no longer compensates for their authoritarianism.

Their belief that income levels for affordable must be constrained to the minimum rather than spread out across a range of income levels as a hedge against luxury proliferation has been rejected by the voters time and again. Their irresolute ideological hubris has prevented them from adapting to repeated feedback.

Sorry, Tim, but we need to take a page out of the bible and cut off Calvin and Rene's hippie pony tails, eliminating their power divined from the Nixon era to turn the page to a contemporarily contextualized affordable housing project.

Et tu, Brute.

But again, the Guardian is endorsing candidates with no credible record against gentrification in the Mission who appear to have won while their allies in the Affordable Housing Mafia seem to have driven the Prop B vehicle over the cliff.

So long as you all editorialize one position and endorse the opposite, the Guardian's credibility will be compromised and so long as we allow paid affordable housing advocates to lose elections we fall further behind faster.

I gave them an easy shot at $30M per year cash money for affordable housing and these idiots fucked it up again. Not only could they not think up the idea, they couldn't even pass it even though they are getting paid to do it.

Quoth David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pierce:: DISQUALIFIED!

We can do better.

-marc

Marc,

Would you stop your pessimistic and delusional bitching for once in your life? It's grinding my gears.

expatriate:
You'll have to forgive Marc his bitching, at least this time. Prop B was his brainchild and it might have attracted more support at the polls if it hadn't been tampered with by Calvin et al. An affordable housing measure that has nothing in it for the middle class is a much tougher sell than Marc's original proposal.

expatriate, for once, can progressives play for keeps like it counts or something?

The problem with the progressive project in San Francisco is that so many involved play as a parlour game rather than as a fight to keep this city accessible to average folks.

And with the residual baby boomer left, who think that 1968 is right around the corner again, in control of housing policy, we are seeing them insist on limiting the provision of affordable housing exclusively for the poor, pointedly excluding the middle class.

They have been warned on this before. When they were crafting Prop F earlier this year, I implored them to divide the pie into fourths instead of thirds, with the last fourth providing housing for cops, firefighters and teachers. They balked and got hosed.

Once Prop B was introduced and the votes appeared, Calvin and his coterie took over the measure, and whittled it down to serve their needs rather than the needs of San Franciscans, who responded negatively at the polls.

My block in the Mission has been a continuous construction zone for the past three years, as buy-out evictions have bleached the block and speculators have been rehabbing and luxuryifying the units, one of which was sold to a Stanford Professor who drives to work each day.

Housing policy as commandeered by the CCHO and CHP has been a flagrant disaster. Either we assess and correct, or we continue losing.

I don't like losing, but apparently those who get paid to do this work don't mind losing, as they get paid no matter what happens.

Fortunately, it seems that with the probable election of Supervisor Avalos, we will have a champion in office who is not conflicted and who gets housing and land use issues in the Mission.

Hopefully, his future colleagues will entrust sponsorship of EN to John and we might actually get some community based planning, the kind that Eric Quezada, Calvin "Better Neighborhoods Plus" Welch and Sue Hestor have been unable to achieve.

For them it is all academic. For me, it is all too real. We have seen the hand off of power from the entitled, narcissistic boomer generation to my generation, generation X - 1, not quite boomer, not quite gen-x, with the election of president Obama. It is high time to turn the crank in San Francisco, to send the hippies into retirement and allow the next generation to move up and assume leadership on housing.

The boomers have had their chance and they have failed, are failing.

Expat, what would you have us do? Stay the course? Shut up and allow the professionals to fail again?

Sorry if my truth telling is bumming your stone, but their failures are bumming mine and tens of thousands of others'.

-marc

FYI:

My precinct (I was a pollworker) had 73 VBM ballots dropped off on Tues Nov 4, that is why there are so many still to process

and this - California Elections Code (not SF code):

15101. (a) Any jurisdiction in which vote by mail ballots are cast
may begin to process vote by mail ballot return envelopes beginning
29 days before the election. Processing vote by mail ballot return
envelopes may include verifying the voter's signature on the vote by
mail ballot return envelope and updating voter history records.
(b) Any jurisdiction having the necessary computer capability may
start to process vote by mail ballots on the seventh business day
prior to the election. Processing vote by mail ballots includes
opening vote by mail ballot return envelopes, removing ballots,
duplicating any damaged ballots, and preparing the ballots to be
machine read, or machine reading them, but under no circumstances may
a vote count be accessed or released until 8 p.m. on the day of the
election. All other jurisdictions shall start to process vote by mail
ballots at 5 p.m. on the day before the election.
(c) Results of any vote by mail ballot tabulation or count shall
not be released prior to the close of the polls on the day of the
election.

DoE people once told me that they couldn't begin to read in ballots until the polls had closed. Perhaps they were referring to departmental policy per the 'may' language above.

That said, the labor intensive portion of processing non-voting place ballots is not the reading them in, which is done in bulk, but tedious processing and verifying the ballot prior to being read in.

-marc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Griot