ELECTION 2022
San Francisco’s ballot is so stuffed this fall, there’s even a vote about when to vote.
Proposition H would do away with San Francisco’s odd-year elections for mayor, sheriff, district attorney, city attorney, and treasurer. SF would instead vote for these key offices in even years, when it votes for U.S. president and other federal offices.
Prop H would have an immediate impact at the top of the local political ticket. Mayor London Breed, currently up for reelection in 2023, would get an extra year and run instead in 2024, as would the other affected officeholders.
Other citywide elections currently on an even-year cycle — public defender, assessor-recorder, school board, and community college board — would not be affected.
Prop H proponents say their reasoning is simple: The more people who vote, the better, and even-year elections have much higher turnout. They note that this measure could double voter turnout in local races, and that more than 50 California cities have made this change in the last decade. (The consolidation would also save SF nearly $7 million in 2023, according to the city controller.)
Breed called it a power grab by the city’s progressive faction, spearheaded by Sup. Dean Preston, even though the measure would give his rival Breed an extra year to convince voters, who are voicing a lot of dissatisfaction with her these days, to give her another four-year term.
Preston authored the measure and at $50,000 is the leading contributor to its campaign to date.
In odd years, there are no federal races to get voters riled up; there are fewer ads on TV and fewer pamphlets dropped in voters’ mailboxes. Recent odd-year turnout in San Francisco has averaged just below 40 percent, while even-year turnout has mostly stayed in the 70 percent to 80 percent range.
James Taylor, professor of political science at the University of San Francisco, says Prop H would do more than increase the number of San Franciscans voting in a few races. It would send a larger message at a moment when so many states are taking steps to make voting less accessible. “San Francisco and Sacramento have tried to expand democracy, almost as a national model for other states, using the tools of government especially at the local level,” he adds.
The even-year shift could also invigorate younger voters and voters from marginalized communities who are more likely to sit out odd-year elections, Taylor tells The Frisc. These are the same communities being targeted for disenfranchisement in other parts of the country.
These newly engaged voters will likely lean more progressive than the wider city electorate, according to Jason McDaniel, political science professor at SF State. Among the city’s ethnic groups, he says the Prop H shift would likely have the most dramatic effect among Latinos, who are currently underrepresented in voter participation. “I think that’s the №1 thing that we would see.”
White voters are dramatically overrepresented, while the shares of Black and Asian American voters are roughly consistent with the populations of those groups, McDaniel observes. But some groups with outsized influence in city politics, such as homeowners and labor unions, may be harmed by the change, he says, because their organizational muscle turns out sympathetic voters in odd-year cycles.
Mayor London Breed called SF’s 45% voter turnout in odd-year elections a “relative strength” compared with Los Angeles.
Prop H is supported by about half the Board of Supervisors, and opposed by the mayor. When the board was debating the measure this summer, Breed wrote that she supports more participation, but in her estimation the measure hadn’t received enough study or public input. California cities were able to start shifting elections after the 2001 passage of the state’s Voting Rights Act.
Breed cited Los Angeles, where officials spent a year researching before bringing a similar change to voters. She also called SF’s odd-year voter turnout of around 45 percent a “relative strength” compared with even lower numbers in L.A.
McDaniel agrees Prop H is being rushed, but supports it nonetheless. Both he and USF’s Taylor believe the mayor’s opposition stems more from a worry of an electorate that tilts more progressive and less moderate.
The only other organized effort against Prop H comes from the local Republican Party, which wrote that doing away with odd-year elections would leave voters overwhelmed by lengthy ballots in even years: “Expecting voters to make 70 thoughtful decisions on one ballot is unrealistic.”
Both in SF and statewide, the dependence on ballot initiatives has indeed swollen our elections and required voters to sort through tangled issues often more fit for experts.
An even longer ballot, consolidated into even years, could have unintended consequences. When voters are overwhelmed, they may not fill out their entire ballot or simply turn to familiarity to make choices instead of doing their homework. “You’re going to see a higher level of incumbency advantage,” according to McDaniel.
Taylor at USF concurs, and says that more access to early and mail-in voting can help counteract that advantage.
There’s another way Prop H could make for a longer ballot. Under current rules, measures can reach the ballot in a few ways. Those that use the signature-gathering route must hit a threshold based on 5 percent of votes cast in the previous mayoral election.
Shifting mayoral elections to even years would cause that requirement to skyrocket — perhaps double. Critics of too much direct democracy might applaud, but Prop H’s writers have no intention of raising the ballot bar. Instead, the measure would change the signature threshold to a different standard: 2 percent of registered voters.
Based on recent numbers, then, Prop H would actually lower the bar for getting future initiatives on the ballot, from 10,300 valid signatures to about 10,000.
Whether H wins or loses, SF can expect long lists of initiatives in future elections — but not, we might hope, another vote on when to vote.
Daniel Lempres is a reporter based in the East Bay. He has contributed research and reporting to the New York Times, USA Today, KQED, the Humboldt Times-Standard, the Los Angeles Times, The Markup, California Magazine and the East Bay Express.