SF: why vote for Chesa Boudin, Dean Preston, tax on Uber/Lyft for increasing traffic, sunlight on dark money & more? Because inequality!

It Might Happen To You
Nov 5 · 14 min read

Register & get paid time off to vote by 8pm, Tues., 11/5/19

Slackers can vote: In CA, register and vote at any City Hall on or by 8pm, Tues., 11/5/19.

Table of contents

  1. Why vote
  2. Why us
  3. Tools we use to do our own research
  4. Our short voter guide (listed in the order it appears on your paper ballot)
  5. Why vote at a polling place (instead of by mail)
  6. When & where to vote
  7. Share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

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1. Why vote

Be a voter! Bernie Sanders won his first race by 10 votes. Some political candidates and ballot measures that could have improved your life lost by just a few votes. Even if they lose, your vote helps their policies get more votes in the future. Who you vote for local government could eventually be your next mayor or governor and beyond! Or don’t vote so cities like SF might continue to have the same income inequality as Rwanda.

2. Why us

Unlike some voter guides, we:

  • Have written laws that were enacted in CA . We know that if laws aren’t written to have any enforcement, then surprise, surprise, it can’t be enforced. So that’s what we look for in our analysis.
  • Accept money from…no one! Most voter guides (newspapers, nonprofits, political organizations such as Democratic Clubs) accept ad money or donations, sometimes from organizations that advocate for propositions the voter guides can endorse. For instance, the Robert F. Kennedy Democratic Club opposed Prop T to put strong limits on lobbyists’ financial firepower. This is in contrast to RFK who tried to help our nation’s poorest as a senator from New York. RFK’s son even said he’s exploring legal options to stop the club’s use of his dad’s name to raise dark money for darker purposes.
  • Link to sources like the legal text that propositions have to follow if they win. So you know we don’t make stuff up. Some props are so ridiculous, we can’t even make them up!
  • We read a crap-ton of articles with opposing views.
  • We spent 30+ hours reading 7 voter guides so you don’t have to. We link to articles, CA and SF Department of Elections Voter Info Pamphlet books, analyses by people we trust: SF Bay Guardian and SF Examiner papers, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, SF Green Party (if their site is down, try SF Greens), League of Women Voters and SF League of Pissed Off Voters. They don’t always agree with each other. We’re not part of them. We’re just their online voter guide voyeurs. We agreed with most of what they said. We agreed with SF Tenants Union on all their endorsements!

3. Tools we use to do our own research

We’ve been tricked by “nonpartisan” apps and websites that claimed to help us decide. So we don’t use them. For instance, we researched an affordable housing ballot measure once for months. We already knew we were going to vote yes. But one website asked if we cared about affordable housing. We said yes. They said to vote no without citing sources as to why. If we listened to them, we would have accidentally voted to increase evictions. So we told the ballot measure organizers. They filed a complaint against that site to the appropriate government agency.

Ballotpedia is the best website we found that answered our hard questions. It’s a comprehensive, nonpartisan online guide to federal, state, and local elections in the USA with the legal text of proposed laws (propositions/ballot measures), in-depth information, and most importantly, who’s paying to support and oppose them.

We also use VoteSmart (recommended by the NY Times) to:

  1. Read a candidate’s voting record. A good predictor of what someone will do is not what they say but what they did.
  2. Follow the money.

Well-known journalists also use MapLight to track money and votes for the US Congress and the California and Wisconsin state legislatures. You can also search donors/contributors or expenditures of political campaigns via Election Track and Maplight’s CA Power Search. It seems to have more data than other sites. And it searches past and present elections. For San Francisco campaign finances by election, see the Ethics Commission dashboard.

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4. Our short voter guide (listed in the order it appears on your paper ballot)

Sometimes we suggest that you leave a vote blank, especially because incumbents usually win and we didn’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils when they don’t need our vote.

Please obey exclamation points below :)

  • Mayor: 1st choice: Joel Ventresca. Leave other choices blank.
  • City Attorney: no endorsement
  • District Attorney: Chesa Boudin!!
  • Public Defender: Mano Raju
  • Sheriff: no endorsement
  • Treasurer: no endorsement
  • SF Board of Education: no endorsement
  • SF Community College Board: no endorsement
  • SF Board of Supervisors, District 5: Dean Preston!
  • Prop A: $600M affordable housing bond — YES
  • Prop B: Get some disabled & aging adults on the Commission of Disabled & Aging Adults— Yes
  • Prop C: “Let Juul Write Vape Law ‘For The Children — HELL FUCKING NO,’” says SF League of Pissed Off Voters
  • Prop D: Better-than-nothing tax on Uber/Lyft for increasing traffic by 62% — Yes, sigh
  • Prop E: Affordable housing for teachers & families — YES
  • Prop F: Sunlight on dark money — YES!

5. Our long voter guide

Mayor: 1st choice: Joel Ventresca. Leave other choices blank.

Who isn’t endorsing current Mayor London Breed: SF Bay Guardian SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, SF Green Party and SF League of Pissed Off Voters. She:

Join the SF Green Party and vote for Ventresca because he “supports social housing (democratically-run, publicly owned rental housing, for people of all income levels, with rents capped based on income), commercial rent control, a ban on Airbnb, more democratic oversight of the Housing Authority, and free Muni…Ventresca is not running much of a campaign, but San Franciscans should vote for him as a signal that we’re not happy with business as usual.”

City Attorney: no endorsement

See why you might want to join the SF Green Party and SF Tenants Union and vote for no one.

District Attorney: Chesa Boudin!

Chesa is a Public Defender who has a detailed plan, such as:

  • Treating mental illness, housing instability and substance use.
  • Testing all rape evidence kits. The incumbent, Suzy Loftus, “allegedly helped cover up the SF Police Department’s failure to test rape kits…As a result, both Loftus and the City are being sued in a case that’s currently being petitioned at the US Supreme Court.”
  • Allowing all survivors of crime to choose restorative justice in which “people who cause harm must commit to no longer causing similar harm. This is consistently among the most important desires sought by harmed parties. It requires addressing underlying causes of crime, such as housing, drug use, and economic instability. And it helps the person who committed crime avoid the shame that often leads to violence in the first place. This is essential to reducing the incredibly high recidivism rates produced by the current system, which make us all less safe.”

Join Bernie Sanders, SF Bay Guardian, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, SF Green Party, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote Chesa Boudin!

Public Defender: Mano Raju

Raju is endorsed by Matt Gonzalez, former Green Party Mayoral candidate. Raju shares many values with the Green Party: he is strongly opposed to the Death Penalty.

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Green Party, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote Mano Raju!

Sheriff: no endorsement

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Green Party, SF Tenants Union and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote for no one. The current candidate is running opposed and doesn’t offer a clear plan for reform.

Treasurer: no endorsement

The only candidate running is José Cisneros who was appointed in 2004 by Gavin Newsom. According to the SF League of Pissed Off Voters, his main job is to manage the City’s money. He flies across the country lobbying to put more money into Wall Street megabanks and he “sabotaged the City’s efforts by filling our Public Bank Task Force with Wall Street goons.”

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Green Party, SF Tenants Union and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote for no one.

SF Board of Supervisors, District 5: Dean Preston

His website says he’ll work to:

  • Get free Muni by 2025.
  • Ban developers from donating to officials who will be making decisions on their developments.
  • A Green New Deal for San Francisco to replace investor-controlled utilities with clean public power
  • A SF public bank that can divest City’s dollars from Wall Street megabanks and invest them in the community to build affordable housing and provide low-cost loans for first-time homeowners and small businesses.

He founded Tenants Together and authored 2018’s Prop F, which guarantees free lawyers to all San Franciscans facing eviction.

The other candidate, Vallie Brown, evicted tenants and lied and said they didn’t pay rent.

So join SF Bay Guardian, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, SF Green Party and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote Dean Preston for SF Board of Supervisor District 5!

SF Board of Education: no endorsement

According to the SF Bay Guardian, “When Gavin Newsom was mayor, his full-time education staffer, Hydra Mendoza, was also on the School Board. School Board members should be independent of the Mayor’s Office — which among other things has some control over city money that goes to the public schools. On that principle, we’re not endorsing Lam.”

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Green Party, SF Tenants Union and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote for no one!

SF Community College Board: no endorsement

Join the SF Tenants Union and SF Green Party and vote for no one. Ivy Lee is running unopposed for college board. She declined to answer the Green Party’s endorsement questionnaire on her stance on issues.

SF propositions

Prop A: $600M Affordable Housing Bond — Yes

According to the SF Bay Guardian:

The only problems with Prop. A are that it’s too limited — and tenants will have to pay for some of it.

The Mayor’s Office carefully constructed this measure to make sure that it doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes. The cap on the bonds is based on how many existing bonds are getting paid off, since new debt can be reflected in property taxes….

Unfortunately, under state law bond acts need a two-thirds vote. And anything that raised taxes would spur opposition from commercial real-estate interests. A truly progressive and committed mayor might take those interests on directly, but that’s not Mayor Breed’s style.
Under local law, landlords can pass through half of the bond costs to their tenants. That’s a problem, and the city ought to change it (again, risking landlord opposition to bond acts).
But for now, it’s critical to vote Yes on A.

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote yes on Prop A.

Prop B: Get some disabled & aging adults on the Commission of Disabled & Aging Adults: — Yes

According to the SF League of Pissed Off Voters:

Three of the seven Commissioner seats should reflect the constituencies served by the Department. One seat must be held by a senior (60+), another seat by an adult (18+) with an ADA-recognized disability, and a third seat by a former US military member who was other-than-dishonorably-discharged.

It’s better than nothing, though here’s why the SF Green Party isn’t voting for it:

It changes some of the qualifications for three of the seven members of the Aging and Adult Services Commission, but still unacceptably leaves the Mayor in charge of appointing all seven commissioners. This leaves San Francisco with a fundamental lack of democracy on that commission.

Prop B is a slight improvement over the status quo, by requiring representation from some groups, such as veterans, who may have previously been under-represented. But Green Party members also believe that passing Prop B would give the public a false sense of reform, when not much is really changing at all.

But join SF Bay Guardian, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote yes on Prop B.

Prop C: “Let Juul Write Vape Law ‘For The Children — HELL FUCKING NO,’” says SF League of Pissed Off Voters

For every adult who uses vaping to quit cigarette smoking, 80 young people will take up the deadly habit after starting with products like JUUL, a 2018 study out of the Dartmouth School of Medicine shows.

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Green Party, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote NO on Prop C!

Prop D: Better-than-nothing tax on Uber/Lyft for increasing traffic by 62% — Yes, sigh

We agree with the SF Green Party in spirit because they’re right in that:

Uber and Lyft are responsible for the huge increase in traffic congestion in San Francisco. A 2019 study showed that these companies caused 2/3 of a 62% rise in congestion between 2010 and 2016…Traffic causes dangerous air quality, increased greenhouse gas emissions, injuries and deaths for pedestrians and bicyclists, and lost time and increased stress for everybody.

To “mitigate” these impacts, Prop D would add a token 15–33 cent increase to the cost of a typical $10 Uber or Lyft ride. It is projected to raise $35 million per year, supposedly to relieve traffic congestion.

We oppose Prop D because the tax is far too small compared to the size of the problem. $35 million is tiny on the scale of our City budget, and will have almost no impact on traffic.

What is really needed? A USF report estimated that making Muni free to all riders would cost less than $200 million per year. A tax rate just five to ten times higher than proposed in Prop D could pay for free Muni…

The fact that Uber and Lyft both wrote and endorse Prop D is evidence that these corporations agree with us that the Prop D tax will be too small to cause any decrease in their ridership.

Also, it feel very wrong that Prop D’s author, Supervisor Aaron Peskin, was taken to dinner by Uber and Lyft representatives, including Peskin’s former aide who now has a job at Uber.

But we’ve been waiting years for government to do something, anything! So join SF Bay Guardian, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote yes on Prop D! More importantly push for more effective policies like free Muni buses.

Prop E: Affordable housing for teachers & families — YES

According to SF League of Pissed Off Voters:

Right now, nearly 75% of the City is zoned either RH-1 or RH-2, meaning it’s only legal for developers to build either one unit or two building units on the property. Assuming that an “apartment building” would be at least 3 units, this means that it’s currently illegal to build apartment buildings in 75% of the city. If you instead assume that an apartment building should be at least five units, then it’s illegal to build apartment buildings in 87% of the City.

Prop E’s zoning changes only apply to affordable housing development. These zoning changes are definitely not going to lead to tall luxury development anywhere near you.

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote yes on Prop E.

Prop F: Sunlight on dark money — YES!

Last year, Republican Venture Capitalist Ron Conway raised hundreds of thousands for his Progress San Francisco State PAC to buy the Mayoral election for London Breed, but there’s no way you could have known this until late in the election, thanks to weak campaign advertising disclosure laws that Prop F will strengthen.

By shining a light on dark money, voters can know the true source of funds. Prop F will require campaign advertisements from independent political committees to disclose the top three contributors to the committee above $5k (currently the threshold is $10k), as well as the top three contributors to any secondary independent political committees that contributed to the first committee.

Prop F requires that printed campaign financial disclaimers that were required to be 12 point font size are now required to be 14 point and bold. Audio and Video advertisements will need to move their financial disclaimers to the Beginning of the media instead of the End. Can you imagine a commercial where the first words you hear are “Paid for by Juul”?

Donor identities can currently be concealed by contributions from LLCs and LLPs. Prop F closes the LLC and LLP loopholes by banning contributions to candidates running for office, same as other types of corporate entities.

Prop F also combats Pay to Play corruption by limiting contributions from persons with financial interests in pending land use approvals. Developers, owners and directors of such entities cannot contribute money to the campaigns of the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors, the City Attorney, and any candidates for these offices while the land use matters are being considered and for the 12 months afterward.

Join SF Bay Guardian, SF Green Party, SF Tenants Union, Sierra Club, and SF League of Pissed Off Voters and vote yes on Prop E!

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6. Why vote at a polling place

Thousands of vote-by-mail ballots were rejected because voters:

  • Signed their ballot envelope differently than their signature on file, which is usually an electronic signature from the Department of Motor Vehicles. It can look different than a paper signature. And your signature most likely changed over the years. Some of my friends had their ballots rejected recently though they voted for years. They’re a little screwed because they can’t remember how they signed when they registered to vote years ago!
  • Forgot to sign the ballot envelope or include the ballot.
  • Used the wrong envelope.
  • Voted twice (by mail and in-person).

7. When & where to vote

  1. Check online to make sure you’re registered to vote. If not, you can register via that link.
  2. Click “more info” from this link to register to vote, and opt to permanently get your absentee vote-by-mail (so you won’t accidentally miss your chance to vote if you’re sick or out of town around an election). You can still vote at a polling place with or without your vote-by-mail ballot.
  3. See where to vote by typing your address in Voter’s Edge.
  4. In California, if you can’t vote at a polling place, mail your CA absentee vote-by-mail ballot on or before Election Day, or drop it off yourself or via someone else at any polling place by 8pm on Election Day in the county where you are registered to vote. If you requested a vote-by-mail ballot, but are afraid it won’t get counted, bring it with its envelope to a polling place. Then ask for a standard ballot and feel instant satisfaction feeding it through the vote counting machine. (Only fill out a provisional ballot as a last resort. They are hand counted and sometimes don’t get counted.)
  5. At your polling place, you have the right to vote if you are a registered voter even if your name is not on the list. (You will vote using a provisional ballot which will be counted if you are eligible to vote). You have the right to get help casting your ballot from anyone you choose, except from your employer or union representative.
  6. You can help other people fill out their ballot, if you have their consent.
  7. Keep your ballot stub receipt. See online if your CA vote-by-mail or Provisional Ballot was counted.
  8. If you see illegal election activity, or if your ballot is challenged, not counted or lost, take a photo, video or screenshot and report it to elections@sos.ca.gov, (800) 345–8683, and Election Justice USA.

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It Might Happen To You

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Landlords evict tenants like us to profit more on Airbnb: #HomesNotHotels. Global guide to cheaper/safer/ethical lodging/transport, vote guides, policy kits

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