Tsaiberspace

I voted today. There was one ballot for elections for mayor, district attorney, and sheriff, and another ballot for votes on Propositions A-K, covering miscellaneous local issues.

I learned that there is just a $4915 filing fee to get on the ballot, and that there are no shortage of people willing to spend that kind of money in a race for second place (see CAMPAIGN 2007 SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR’S RACE: Cast of characters livens up the field):

• Mayor Gavin Newsom, incumbent.
• Grasshopper Alec Kaplan, “vegan taxicab driver”.
• George Davis, naked yoga practitioner.
• Chicken John; with a name like that, ’nuff said.
• Michael Powers, owner of Power Exchange (link not provided, NSFW).
• Harold Hoogasian, florist.
• Lonnie Holmes, Juvenile Probation Department manager.
• Wilma Pang, music professor at City College of San Francisco, first Asian American woman to run for mayor.
• Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai, physician.
• Josh Wolf, journalist.
• Quintin Mecke, program director.
• Harold Brown, publisher.

It’s one thing to do what it takes to run for political office no matter what the odds, but it’s another to run irresponsibly. Not to denigrate the candidates, but I really doubt that any of the “alternate” candidates are capable of running a city the size of San Francisco. What would any of the alternate candidates do if they actually won the election?

The thing I really wanted to write about was what I saw at the polling station. I voted on the way home from work, and a few things made me sad:

• No identification verification. They just asked me my name, and crossed my name off of a list.
• Ballot was not truly secret. I put my ballot into a “secrecy folder” (just a big manila folder-like thing). The volunteer then took it out and had to fight the ballot-counting machine to get the ballot into the machine, in the meantime leaving my ballot exposed for everyone to see. I don’t really care, because this isn’t exactly a region of violent political turmoil, but there is a principle of a secret ballot. But this wasn’t a problem, either, because:
• The ballot machine had a counter on the outside displaying the number of ballots processed. The polling station had only a single machine, and that machine read “120″ after accepting my two ballots. That meant only 60 people voted all day in my district (I was the only voter in the building during the time I was voting). I incredulously asked the poll worker if there had really only been 60 people in to vote all day; the volunteer confirmed that the machine’s counter had not been reset all day.

It was already expected that this year would have a record-low voter turnout, but I was expecting more voters (for no good reason). According to Big drop in S.F. voters may lead to record-low election turnout, there are 418,726 registered voters in San Francisco.

There are 11 districts in San Francisco, so figure an average of 38,000 people per district.

• My district is basically a suburb of the city, which I figure is only one-quarter as densely-populated as the rest of the city (probably even less), leaving 9500 voters.
• Let’s further say that 90% of people vote at the end of the workday (I came home early today at 4:30pm), which means 600 people will vote at my polling station today. That leaves my district with a voter turnout rate of 600/9500, or a paltry 6.3%.
• Immigrant elderly are supposed to be active voters, but I will also guess that my district has a lot of ineligible voters, so those effects can cancel each other out.
• Even then, I’ll go ahead and guess that my district is particularly apolitical, and go on record with a prediction of 10-15% voter turnout for the whole city, or 41k-63k votes.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on voter turnout. The trivia highlight is that the record turnout for a national election was in 1876 (81.8%), 1860 with 81.2% (Abraham Lincoln and anti-slavery), and, more contemporarily, 2004 with 60% (GWB vs. John Kerry).

Update 2007-11-08: The results are not available yet, because of a problem with voting machines:

… the final results might not be known until Thanksgiving. … the city is required to individually check every ballot before it can be counted, a time-consuming process.

–S.F. prepares to sue voting machine company