San Francisco lawmakers postponed a vote on appointing a controversial former elections commissioner to the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force after hearing several speakers oppose her nomination and referencing her role in 2022’s redistricting unrest and other controversies.
“I think we need to be grateful for anybody willing to give the kind of time you have given and who is foolish enough to want to continue giving, but I am not comfortable voting on this nomination today,” Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman told other committee members, before suggesting that the matter be postponed until the call of the chair.
Committee chair Shamann Walton responded by moving to continue the discussion at the Feb. 24 meeting, adding, “I agree that we should continue this to the next committee meeting for more time and conversations, but I would say on the record that the last redistricting process was not transparent, fair, or equitable. There were a lot of flaws with that redistricting process.”
Cynthia Dai, a business consultant and academic who served on the state Citizens Redistricting Commission from 2010 to 2020, was appointed to the San Francisco Elections Commission by City Attorney David Chiu in 2022. Her term expired last month, and she was not reappointed. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force is charged with advising the Board of Supervisors on the proper implementation of the city’s open government laws and hearing complaints of violations of those laws.
2022 proved to be a rocky year for the Elections Commission as progressive activists, unsatisfied with the ongoing redistricting process, demanded that elections commissioners serving on the Redistricting Task Force be removed. Dai led the effort inside the commission to remove members Ditka Reiner, Raynell Cooper, and Chasel Lee, which proved unsuccessful but was rancorous enough that another commissioner angrily stepped down. Meanwhile, task force meetings regularly extended into the twilight hours, including a 20-hour marathon meeting on April 9, 2022 that ended in a meltdown.
There were no comments in favor of Cynthia Dai’s nomination for the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.
Later that year, Dai led an effort to fire long-serving Director of Elections John Arntz, ostensibly, according to Dai, “to take action on the city’s racial equity plan” and allow a person of color a chance to apply for his job. However, some observers alleged that the decision was made in retaliation for Arntz failing to consider implementing a proprietary, open-source voting system, instead continuing to contract with Dominion Voting Systems. In any case, the move met widespread opposition and was eventually quashed by the Board of Supervisors.
Dai then moved on to another initiative, this time supported by then-Supervisor Aaron Peskin, to reorganize the redistricting process into one more likely to “request the assistance of a broad range of community-based organizations, community groups, civic organizations, and civil rights organizations in recruitment and outreach efforts to identify potential members of the Task Force,” as well as, according to some, weaken the principle of “one person, one vote.”
During the public comment portion of the hearing, several people came to the podium to oppose Dai’s appointment. San Francisco Democratic Party Executive Director Bobak Esfandiari, speaking only for himself as a witness to 2022’s redistricting unrest, told the committee, “For a commissioner who professes to care about independent bodies, acting independently, to throw that kind of a monkey wrench at the eleventh hour into a body that was working very hard under extraordinarily difficult, compressed circumstances because of the Covid pandemic, to entertain that stuff and to also lean into the frivolous arguments being used seemed bizarre to me, and did not exhibit good leadership.”
Democratic Central Committee member Lily Ho, who was a member of the 2022 Redistricting Task Force, also had choice words for Dai, telling the committee that “She weaponized the chaos that ensued” during that task force’s process and that she “has a history of concocting fake news to justify overreach of her authority. One of the most important lessons I learned while on redistricting is how easy it is to sow division and divide our city with lies.”
“We were forced to do our work under extreme harassment and difficult circumstances,” former Elections Commissioner Ditka Reiner told the committee. “Cynthia Dai and her colleagues dragged us in front of the Elections Commission during our mapping process to justify our work. They created a spectacle and smeared our name in the papers. But in public, with the light of day, they couldn’t justify their accusations.”
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for City Attorney Chiu told the Voice, “We thank Commissioner Dai for her service.”
UPDATED 2/11 to add context regarding one of the speakers at the meeting.
