S.F. Voter Concerns Surface

They have become perverse collector’s items, evidence of what many say are serious problems at City Hall: a dozen ballot box lids found floating in San Francisco Bay and as far north as Point Reyes 30 miles away.

One of the red plastic lids sits behind the bar at an area swimming club. Another is kept as a trophy of sorts at a Marin County weekly newspaper. And two local artists have turned the image of a third crumpled lid into a poster that reads: “Cast Your Vote ... Away.”

Artist Judith Selby calls her discovery the political version of finding a body washed up onshore: “You know there’s a story here.”

As voters in this politically charged city head for the polls Tuesday, state officials continue their scrutiny of the city’s troubled Department of Elections, probing accusations of vote tampering and machine politics inside Mayor Willie Brown’s administration.

In a series of embarrassing miscues reminiscent of the 2000 Florida presidential vote, recent San Francisco elections have featured lost, discarded and miscounted ballots. The missteps have caused public confidence to plummet and may translate into an all-time-low voter turnout.

The malaise prompted Secretary of State Bill Jones last year to launch an investigation into alleged ballot tampering. San Francisco supervisors have also formed an independent commission to oversee the vote-count process, beginning with Tuesday’s results.

In November, Jones called for sweeping reforms of local election procedures, pointing to “significant and substantial irregularities” he characterized as the worst he had ever seen.

But a frustrated Jones--a GOP gubernatorial contender--said last week that little progress has been made. And he complained of the city’s “stalling and foot-dragging tactics.” He laid the blame for the department’s problems “on the doorstep of the mayor and the Board of Supervisors.”

At a meeting with officials last month, he set an April 16 deadline for the city to follow up on its promise to recanvass 324,000 votes that were improperly counted during the November 2000 election.

And Jones said he has yet to rule out fraud within the embattled department: “I am not at all satisfied with what is going on here.”

On Tuesday, ballots for the first time will be guarded by sheriff’s deputies, and state undercover observers may also monitor polling sites. “Every other California city conducts elections without such problems,” Jones said, “but in San Francisco, there seem to be other agendas at work.”

San Francisco has had a history of troubled elections and voter snafus--such as the year wet ballots had to be dried in a microwave. The secretary of state’s office, which oversees state elections, has intervened in city voting six of the last seven years.

Supervisor Tony Hall, who helped create the new oversight board, bristles at city critics. “We’re trying to clean up our act here, but change does not come overnight,” Hall said. “Any help we can get is better than none at all.”

A recent poll of 500 city voters found that 31% said they distrusted local election officials to accurately count the votes. “That’s an extraordinarily high number of people,” said San Francisco-based pollster David Binder, who conducted the survey. “It shows a serious lack of confidence.”

San Francisco officials blame the mistakes on staff turnover, which has included five Department of Elections chiefs in seven years and the loss of numerous lower-level employees with experience. The city also began a new optical-scan ballot-counting system two years ago--a change that has added headaches, they say.

City Administrator Bill Lee admitted to “some minor problems,” but said they have been overblown in the “blood-sport world” of local politics, where activists are quick to cry foul if their measures or candidates go down to defeat.

For instance, the floating ballot box lids--63 of them--simply blew away during a late November storm while being cleaned on a bay-side pier. A handful were later recovered by local residents and the U.S. Coast Guard, but many are still missing. There is no proof that any ballot boxes or actual votes followed them over the side.

“People are using the lost lids to suggest that things are screwed up here,” said Lee, a Brown appointee who hired the last four elections chiefs. “But has anyone ever proven fraud? Has any vote ever been thrown out? No. Never.”

But elections activists claim the city is trying to soft-pedal its serious miscues. “It’s simply tragic when the people who live in the most politically active city in the state, if not the entire country, are left feeling increasingly disenfranchised during their elections,” said Kim Alexander, president of the Sacramento-based California Voter Foundation. “It’s a signal that something is terribly wrong.”

The state investigation began last May after a city elections official claimed that 3,600 votes cast in the November 2000 election were unaccounted for and that officials knew the count was inaccurate when they certified the vote.

Supervisors called for an independent federal inquiry into the department, and state investigators began sifting through ballots. They later found that all 21 sampled precincts contained ballots that were tabulated improperly--calling into question the results of several close races and initiatives.

Things got worse last November when Department of Elections chief Tammy Haygood, hired based on her experience as a quality control engineer for a diaper manufacturer, removed several hundred absentee ballots from City Hall for counting--a move she called a precautionary measure after the September terrorist attacks.

Several days later, elections officials discovered that 240 marked and uncounted ballots had found their way inside voting machine storage bins. Officials also acknowledged that a temporary poll worker walked off with 200 blank ballots and then failed to show up for work on voting day.

Lee said blank ballots are routinely distributed to poll workers prior to election day. But the worker had suddenly committed himself for treatment at a local psychiatric facility, and officials were unable to retrieve the ballots from his downtown hotel room without a court order.

Several missing ballots were recovered from atop a downtown trash can. “This guy had worked for us for three years without a problem,” Lee said. “How were we to know? But this kind of blameless thing has given us a black eye.”

Activists wonder just how blameless such events are.

“People watching San Francisco from a distance are beginning to wonder: ‘Is this just one blunder after another or a series of mistakes that signals deeper problems?’” Alexander said. “‘Is this a public agency that has been deliberately kept incompetent so that it can be manipulated by local politicians?’”

Alexander said the recent election miscues were causing ripple effects in local politics. “It’s not just the voters but people who have been politically active for many years who are growing cynical,” she said. “Many are questioning their future participation.”

Veteran activist Ross Mirkarimi, who is also a private investigator, had campaigned for two public power initiatives that were both narrowly defeated in last November’s election--one by 533 votes.

Like others, Mirkarimi wonders whether the election was stolen. “Even if investigators haven’t found the smoking gun of fraud, they have revealed a pattern of incidents that deflates the public trust. And that’s just as bad.”

Mirkarimi said he now feels embarrassed for San Francisco. “People now refer to us as Little Florida. And that spells trouble.”

Central to the controversy has been the turnover within the Department of Elections and its revolving door of directors.

Haygood, the most recent elections chief, is an attorney and quality control engineer at a computer company and a diaper manufacturing plant. Lee said she was nonetheless considered the best of seven applicants--none with election experience.

“She knew everything about making diapers,” Lee said. “She had this attention to detail that I felt translated to the elections job. Before you can issue voters pamphlets, you need to know how things fit together.”

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said San Francisco--with its high turnover--is seen as a questionable career move. “Clearly, no one I knew applied,” she said. “People see how registrars have been treated there. There’s no support. This is a high-stress job, and you are going to make mistakes. But in San Francisco, there seems to be no room for error. Who wants a job like that?”

Supervisor Hall hopes the new elections oversight commission can restore voter confidence.

“We’re finally trying to make corrections after years and years of abuse,” said Hall, who claims that San Francisco votes have been politically influenced since the Gold Rush days. “So it’s going to take a little while to educate people that, yes, their vote does count and, yes, we do want them to vote.”

Meanwhile, beachcombers continue their hunt for the season’s hottest collectible: the plastic ballot lids bearing the official San Francisco city seal.