When San Francisco concluded a strife-ridden process to redraw supervisorial district lines in 2022, it set the stage for protracted political battles, reflected this election season. Board of Supervisors president and mayoral hopeful Aaron Peskin wants to offer voters the chance to approve a redesigned redistricting task force he claims will be free of politics. Some say this gift horse may be a Trojan Horse.
The spring of 2022 was a season of protracted battle at City Hall. The city’s Redistricting Task Force, charged with a complex, nonpartisan task of making new district lines that reflect the demography of a changing San Francisco, was plunged into a vicious sectarian fight between progressives and moderates that brought standing-room-only crowds to meetings that repeatedly extended into twilight hours, along with vitriolic partisan infighting on the task force itself. Demographic changes caused in part by development policies of the previous decade compelled significant revisions.
Meanwhile, progressives argued that more emphasis should have been placed on preventing the dilution of communities of shared interest like ethnicity or culture. That also meant diluting their electoral base, once safely ensconced in political strongholds in the city’s eastern districts. They marshaled supporters to flood the task force’s public comment period, jamming the proceedings and forcing sessions into the early morning hours.
As a new district map approached approval, they accused task force members representing the Elections Commission of misconduct. They hectored that commission’s leadership into convening a hearing over whether to sack them. The commission found no reason to remove their representatives, but one commissioner eventually resigned in protest over how they were treated. The chaos also forced the task force process to work beyond its mandated deadline, risking legal action.
Ultimately, the new map left many politicians on both sides of the ideological aisle unhappy. Still, progressives lost more: the Tenderloin, a stronghold of affordable housing and service nonprofits that make up a large part of their political base, was moved to District 5, already the most left-leaning district, and away from District 6, the South of Market-dominated zone that experienced the most significant population growth. That would ultimately help Matt Dorsey, a moderate appointed as supervisor by Mayor London Breed, to be elected to the job in his own right later that year.
Meanwhile, on the Westside, Joel Engardio, a moderate who had previously run unsuccessfully for District 7 supervisor, found his Lakeshore neighborhood — along with his constituent s— moved to the Sunset-dominated District 4, and he would go on to defeat progressive incumbent Gordon Mar. The new map is also expected to revise handicaps in this November’s supervisorial contests, particularly in the Richmond’s District 1, where another progressive incumbent, Connie Chan, faces a strong challenge from former Breed aide and business consultant Marjan Philhour.
Enter Peskin and his charter amendment, which he introduced on May 21, along with another establishing a city inspector general and two more addressing commission reform in response to a measure proffered by advocacy group TogetherSF. Interestingly, he described the others in his roll call speech as “good government policies that make local government accessible and effective for a diversity of San Franciscans while rooting out corruption that has continued to plague our government” but did not mention the redistricting measure.
The measure creates an “independent redistricting task force” to revise district lines after future census counts. At first glance, it would seem in line with recent reforms toward redistricting bodies that are independent of city councils around the state, often driven by scandals such as one in Los Angeles that also occurred in 2022, where secret recordings between city council members and a labor leader revealed intent to reduce Black representation. Activists have been pushing for state legislation that would mandate independent bodies at the local level, as well as local initiatives, with some success.
But as usual, the devil is in the details.
One detail is that San Francisco’s task force is already independent, with multiple appointing authorities from the Board of Supervisors, the Mayor’s Office, and the Elections Commission. Peskin’s measure would reduce the appointing authority to a new cadet office of the Department of Elections, which would oversee an extended appointment process with an application review panel with members from city departments. It would also increase the size of the body from nine members to 14, plus two alternates.
“Drawing legislative district lines is inherently political, requiring difficult choices between competing values and interests.”
— Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science, San Francisco State University
Peskin’s measure is based on the recommendations of the Fair, Independent, and Effective Redistricting for Community Engagement — or FIERCE — committee of the Elections Commission, which Commissioner Cynthia Dai led. Dai also figured in the attempt to remove Elections Commission appointees from the task force in 2022 and a quixotic attempt to remove the director of elections, John Arntz.
All of that has some task force veterans concerned.
“It changes the current public and open selection process to one closed-door single administrative body with seriously subjective criteria. It’s ripe for manipulation and corruption. It is not transparent, and the appointing body is not accountable to anybody,” 2022 task force member Lily Ho told The Voice in an email. “A 14-member task force allows for tie votes, and requiring a supermajority of 9 votes for any action is highly problematic. Nothing would ever get done.”
A quick scan of the measure also reveals a mandate that the task force administrator “shall 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.”
Language in the charter mandating that districts be equal in population and “conform to the rule of one person, one vote” is also weakened, replaced by language providing that the task force “may adopt additional prioritized criteria to consider when adopting a map, so long as those criteria are prioritized lower than and do not conflict with relevant City, state, and federal laws.”
“This reform has been proposed because the disruptors of the 2022 redistricting process do not agree with the legal and fair map that was ultimately adopted,” Ho added. “This is their attempt at a power grab — creating a redistricting process ripe for corruption. Pushing politicians away from the appointing process is fine, but it doesn’t make it better. We know that there is plenty of room for corruption from unelected people. Just look at our commissions and non-profits.”
Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University, told The Voice in a text, “Drawing legislative district lines is inherently political, requiring difficult choices between competing values and interests.”
“An independent redistricting commission in San Francisco that removes elected officials and political appointees from the process of selecting members will reduce the amount of political conflict over redistricting, but will not eliminate it entirely,” he added. “Redistricting commission members will still be subject to politically motivated public pressure from those who will seek to influence the outcome. Nonetheless, California’s recent experience with independent redistricting commissions has generally been positive, and we can hope that a San Francisco independent redistricting commission will produce a similarly positive experience.”
We reached out to Board President Peskin for comment but have yet to hear back. The measure is expected to be reviewed by the supervisors’ Rules Committee in the coming weeks, and then by the full board. They need to submit it to the Department of Elections by late July to get it on the November ballot.
