Heralding a system that really is rank
By: Ken Garcia
Examiner Staff Writer
11/18/08 2:08 PM PST
San Francisco's newest agency, the Department of Idle Musings has a question that has been stewing for far too long now.
It's two weeks since the election. Do you know who your supervisor is?
For those in the affirmative, we applaud you. For those who lost interest, we understand.
Ranked choice voting, as approved by our local citizens some years back, was supposed to eliminate the desire of costly runoffs and provide quick results in city campaigns. Can we now all at least agree that neither goal was accomplished?
Nearly one-third of all the votes cast in the recent election were mail-in votes, yet several days after the Nov. 4 polling, they were still not counted. Instead, elections officials chose to provide a "preliminary snapshot'' on the ranked-choice races, making sure that almost every interested party went away unsatisfied.
And as for keeping the cost of elections down, did you see where the same forces that gave us this system, also pulled in nearly $2 million from San Francisco's treasury in the name of public campaign financing? If ever there were an elections scam, San Francisco has found it and will continue to pay a hefty price for its electoral indifference.
Elections chief John Arntz has been the target of many slings and arrows for the ranked choice counting farce, but really it's not his fault. Those of us who were criticizing the idea that a big city (and not some town in Connecticut that was cited as the victory source) could adequately handle this trade-off in voting outlined all the problems many times. But the great election experiment passed anyway, and as most things in San Francisco, it will remain until some mighty force stands up to squash it.
In the meantime, you get supervisors who are not quite ready for prime time duty — a step made as easy as one, two, three.
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