Enhancing Elections in San Francisco: Staffing, Facilities, and Recommendations

2. Table of Contents 2 3 4 6 8 12 16 20 21 • Introduction and scope of project . . . . . . . . . . . • Findings • Current state of elections in San Francisco . . . • Current organizational structure . . . . . . . . . . . . • Current facilities and materials flow . . . . . . . . . • Election trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • Recommendations • Organizational structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • Facilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • Additional recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • Appendices • Election commission laws in peer cities . . . . . .

3. Introduction and scope of project • The purpose of this project is to mitigate recent organizational problems within the San Francisco Department of Elections and position the agency for success in the future. The San Francisco Department of Elections has recently experienced significant turnover in key positions including the agency director. The agency has also been unable to develop a permanent corps of experienced election professionals. Furthermore, the agency does not have adequate facilities to operate efficiently and securely. • Establishing the "infrastructure of democracy" begins with a functioning department of elections, with the personnel, facilities, technology and budget to accomplish the goal of safe, secure, efficient, accurate and accessible elections in which the citizens can have confidence. • The scope of this project was two-fold: • Examine the current staffing and organizational structure and develop a staffing plan and structure that will facilitate the development of a corps of permanent, experienced election managers. • Examine the current facilities used by the agency, analyze the flow of materials and develop recommendations for procuring and fitting out appropriate facilities and organizing flows of materials and work to make efficient use of the space.

4. Current state of elections in San Francisco • Starting in 2002, the Department of Elections reported organizationally to a Board of Election Commissioners. The seven Commissioners are appointed by elected officials within the City. The Director of Elections is appointed by the Board of Commissioners. Prior to 2002, the agency reported through the City’s Administrative Services Division. • The Department of Elections employs a mix of temporary, provisional, probationary and permanent staff. The agency has historically reduced staff significantly after elections. Many of these staff reductions affected supervisory and administrative staff as well as rank-and-file election workers. The Department operates with a budget of $8.8 million (based on 2002-03 budget). • San Francisco holds fewer elections per year than other counties in the State. This is due to the special status of the City and County as one governing unit. There are no separate elections for other cities, school districts or bond issues that typically occur in other populous, urban counties. • San Francisco does have a unique run-off law that can force additional elections in certain supervisorial districts within the City. This effectively lengthens the election cycle beyond what occurs in peer counties. San Francisco has a highly educated, politically savvy citizenry. This generates a great deal of visibility over the electoral process in the City and also generates a high volume of initiatives, campaign arguments and candidate statements. The City’s voter information pamphlet or VIP can run up to 300 pages. Due to the longer down cycles in election administration in the City, policy makers have been reluctant in the past to invest in a more permanent infrastructure for the Department. This accounts for the haphazard nature of the Department’s facilities and personnel practices. Indicative of this is the fact that the human resources official within the Department is a temporary worker. The Department uses the Optech optical scan voting system, a system that is not impacted by the recent decertification issues within the State. The Department uses a voter and election management system produced and supported by DIMS, an established developer of election systems based in Oregon. The DIMS system has been used for several years in the City and is a stable installation.

5. Current organizational structure • Given the lack of staff continuity in elections administration in San Francisco, a stable and mature organization has not evolved in the City. This has transpired due to historical and structural problems in City administration. For years, the elections function was embedded within the Department of Administrative Services along with other miscellaneous functions such as animal control and real estate management. Organizational structures are often an accurate reflection of the relative strategic importance of organizational functions. In the City’s structure, the placement of election administration demonstrated a relative lack of strategic importance and a similarly insufficient amount of investment. • For years, the elections department relied almost exclusively on temporary staff hired for an election cycle. A corps of experienced managers was not allowed to develop and accumulate a base of knowledge on how to run an election. • Currently, the organization has approximately 51 staffed positions within the Elections Department. As seen in the pie chart at right, 40 or 78% of these staffpersons are temporary. Only 7 or 14% of the total complement are permanent or probationary. Based on volume benchmarks from peer California counties, San Francisco should have 26 to 28 permanent staff.

6. Current organizational structure • The lack of continuity has also caused a similar lack of development in the Department’s organizational structure. A logical grouping of functions based on process flows, strategy considerations, or personnel has not developed. This creates a situation where informal lines of authority and communication evolve during each election cycle. The diagram at right shows the organizational structure that existed during the summer of 2002. • As seen in the organizational chart, the span of control for the Acting Director is 9, a span that is too broad for effective management. This puts the Director in the position of having to resolve all intra-Departmental problems. • The chart also shows the employment status of each manager. As seen in the chart, none of the managers have permanent employment status with the City although some of them have been with the Department for years on a temporary status. Current organizational structure San Francisco Department of Elections

7. Current facilities and materials flow Department of Elections Facilities Roster City Hall • Administration • Precinct/pollworker recruitment • Campaign/candidate services • Voter outreach • Precincting/redistricting • Voter transactions (affidavits, AV requests, etc.) • Phone bank • Staging, verification and counting of returned AVs Pier 29 • Storage of some voted ballots (for election being investigated) • Storage of precinct supplies and supply bins • Receiving of voted ballots, rosters and supplies after election Cor-o-van Storage facility • Storage of voting machines, chairs and tables used at polling locations • Staging and loading of supply bins, booths and voting machines • Logic testing of machines Simba Facility (Alameda) • Storage of election materials such as petitions, precinct rosters and voted ballots from prior years. Brooks Hall (Across street from City Hall) • Staging and assembly of AV packets (then transported to City mail room) • Canvass 240 Van Ness (Across street from City Hall) • Ballot storage • Staging of ballots, rosters and election supplies • Pickup of rosters, ballots and supplies by inspectors • The Department of Elections currently operates out of six separate facilities spread among the City and Alameda County across the bay. The sidebar at the right lists the functions performed at each facility. The diagram on the following page shows how materials and transactions flow across facilities. • As shown in the sidebar and the flow diagram, election functions and materials are scattered across the city. This presents many key issues regarding the efficient and secure storage, processing and distribution of election supplies: • Excessive movements of sensitive materials such as ballots (voted and unvoted). • Pier 29, an old waterfront warehouse dating from the early 1900s, is not a clean and secure location for storing supplies and voted ballots. No fire suppression. • Processing at Brooks Hall occurs in a basement area without proper fire protection, security, illumination, ventilation or heating. Exhaust fumes from forklift vehicles and cold temperatures are a major irritant to election workers. • 240 Van Ness is condemned for lack of seismic safety features. No emergency exits on 2nd floor. Unsafe wiring. • Hallways and floors in the City Hall must be covered and protected during election periods to avoid damage from hand carts and movement of election materials. • The Cor-o-van facility is a privately owned storage facility the Department shares with other storage clients. Logic testing of voting equipment is conducted in the aisles of the facility in an unsecure setting. Facility is not designed for secure storage.

8. Current facilities and materials flow

9. Election trends • The State legislature has recently considered other changes to the Elections Code such as allowing election day registration and bifurcating the State primary into two separate elections. Changes such as these, while well-intended, will place an unimaginable strain on the already stressed systems and staff of California election offices. • Election laws specific to San Francisco such as instant run-off voting are difficult to implement without an automated vote recording system. Run-off elections also oblige the Elections Department to prepare for a major election while the previous election is winding down. The increasing complexity of elections make it more difficult to rely, as has been the practice, on lightly trained pollworkers, many of whom are retirees performing this work out of civic duty. • Legal complexity • An ongoing issue with County election officials are the legislative and legal mandates that whipsaw election operations. A sampling of these mandates include: • Pending and enacted Federal legislation and standards address access for multilingual and disabled voters. No one debates the merit and intent of these standards and mandates, but the implementation of these measures and lack of Federal funding place additional stress on the finances of election administrators. • State law now requires counties to accept and process new voter registrations up to 15 days prior to an election. This provision makes it much more difficult to prepare voter rosters and distribute them to precincts in time for election day. Furthermore, some legislators have discussed moving the registration cutoff right up to and including election day, a daunting prospect that could not be realized without massive investments in technology. • Both the State legislature and the courts continually tinker with the scope and procedures for primary elections. The latest change, the third in the last six years, restricts voters to voting for candidates from their own party unless the voter is nonpartisan. This continuous tinkering makes it difficult to keep pollworkers up-to-date on the latest procedures.

10. Election trends Technology Part of the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential Election was a nationwide re-examination of the voting systems used by states and counties. Older, heretofore reliable systems such as punchcard ballots have been, or will soon be, eliminated in most states. Given the perceived inaccuracies of other paper-based ballots such as optical scan systems, many jurisdictions are opting for computerized voting systems such as the touchscreen voting terminal. Besides a perception of greater accuracy, touchscreen voting has one enormous advantage over older systems: the ability to absorb and contend with the various twists and tinkering of election laws that takes place around the country. Because the voting medium is digital and votes are stored digitally, the logistical nightmares of dealing with open vs. closed primaries, multiple languages, run-off voting and 15 day registration are lessened. The downside to touchscreen voting is the initial capital cost (e.g., $3,000 to $4,000 per unit). Counties that merely replace voting booths one-for-one with touchscreen devices can run up a giant bill for infrastructure. Unless the units can be leveraged (i.e., more votes cast per unit) through more early voting, combining polling locations, etc. the investment is difficult to justify economically. • Increasing unit costs • One of the biggest issues facing elections officers is the costs of conducting elections especially when viewed from a unit cost basis (e.g., cost per precinct, cost per ballot cast). These cost increases are being driven by several factors: • The increasing use of absentee ballots. The popularity of absentee voting continues to increase at a rapid rate. This trend is strengthened by the advent of universal and permanent absentee voting whereby anyone can vote absentee and, with minimum cause, do so on a permanent basis. Absentee voting accounts for well over 50% of the votes cast in many areas of the west and continues to increase. While absentee voting is a popular convenience for voters, absentee processing is significantly more expensive than precinct voting on a per-vote basis and there is no offsetting reduction in costs for precinct ballots since the Department must order precinct ballots equaling 75% of the registered voters for each precinct. • Increasing number of languages. Most California counties provide ballots and election literature in multiple languages. San Francisco offers 3 languages. This is a positive development in that the electoral process is made easier for new, harder-to-serve populations. Multilingual services are extremely expensive especially on a per-voter basis. With the addition of new languages and more stringent standards for translation, the costs continue to escalate.

11. Election trends Technology(continued) The logistics of storing, programming, staging, delivering, setting up, taking down and de-programming the units are awesome for a large, urbanized county. The pollworker training needs are also significant. Undoubtedly, implementing touchscreen voting on a large scale will force many aging pollworkers into permanent retirement. Another technical issue involves absentee balloting. Unlike the tallying of precinct ballots, counting absentee ballots is slow and labor-intensive. Touchscreen voting also does nothing for absentee voting unless it entices formerly serial absentee voters to vote at some sort of early voting center. New procedures and technologies such as barcoding the return envelopes and imaging voter signatures have increased labor productivity. With the relentless increase in absentee voting in California (mirrored by national trends as well), the Department of Elections must explore additional technology and process redesign to control the cost of processing absentee ballots, improve labor productivity and expedite the tallying of the ballots. Technologies such as touchscreen voting devices may make it possible to offer further choices to voters in the way they cast ballots. In the future, voters will increasingly have more options for casting votes when and where it is the most convenient, perhaps at other locations than where they live and during a period of several days, not just on a single day. Pollworkers and Polling Locations Next to decertified election systems, the greatest strategic challenge for election officers in the new millenium is the unavailability of pollworkers. Typically, the Department of Elections hires up to 2,500 pollworkers for 600 polling locations during a Countywide election. Most of these pollworkers are retirees and are increasingly unable to serve. Younger generations are not as inclined to serve as pollworkers and, therefore, the productivity of the pollworker recruiting staff is not keeping pace with the need. States and counties are experimenting with ways to ensure adequate election staffing. In the most extreme case, Oregon has eliminated the need for pollworkers altogether by going to 100% voting by mail. Other jurisdictions are combining polling locations to leverage pollworkers or recruiting businesses to run polling locations and provide workers. Recruiting polling locations is also getting more difficult as the requirements become more complicated. In the near future, all polling locations may be required to be wheelchair-accessible, a requirement that may invalidate many existing privately owned locations that have steps or those affected by San Francisco’s steeply sloped neighborhoods. Although not currently permitted under California law, some out-of-state jurisdictions have experimented with community voting centers set up in shopping malls, locations that are convenient, accessible to disabled voters and conducive to serving a larger geographic area, not just a neighborhood.

12. Election trends Implications for San Francisco The preceding discussion of election trends should make it clear that elections will never again be a periodic clerical exercise that is run twice a year. • Elections will be less paper-based and more computerized. Election offices will need relatively fewer clerks and clerical supervisors and more technicians and technology integrators. • Elections will continue to get more expensive. Election offices will need more seasoned, experienced managers that can budget accordingly and find the efficiencies that can control the costs of elections. • Elections will have more procedural twists and legislative changes and less consistency and simplicity. Election offices, therefore, will need more full-time analysts and skilled managers and relatively fewer temporary workers to figure out how to adapt to a new election model every two to four years. • Pollworkers will be increasingly difficult to recruit. Polling locations that are ADA-compliant will have to be located and recruited. San Francisco, along with other counties, will either have to pour more resources into recruitment, get creative and figure out how to run an election with fewer, more professional pollworkers and fewer polling locations or simply vote by mail as in Oregon. Each of these options require more analysis and preparation time. The overall implication for San Francisco is that the Elections Department must start to develop a core of experienced elections managers that can anchor the conduct of elections on a year-to-year basis and contend with the technological, financial, personnel, legal and procedural challenges of the future. The next few pages discuss recommendations that should position the City to develop this corps of professional election managers.

13. Recommendations - Organizational structure • Recommended staffing level • The Department currently has 11 non-temporary positions. Based on benchmarks comparisons1 from election offices in peer counties, the Department should increase this to 28 permanent staffpersons. This staffing complement would, of course, be augmented significantly during the election cycle as temporary workers are hired for additional data entry, warehouse, distribution, help desk and recruiting tasks. Based on recent history, the Department may hire as many as 125 additional temporary workers at the height of the election cycle. • Recommended organizational structure • The diagram on the following page illustrates our recommended organizational structure. This structure represents an appropriate balance among several organizing criteria: • Span of control – At 7:1 for the Director of Elections and no more than 3:1 for any Division Manager, the span of control is within a manageable range. Number of management layers – the recommended structure has three layers of management. Many Section Supervisors will serve as working managers much of the time thereby reducing the effective layers. Strategic placement – The structure recognizes the importance of strategically important functions by carving out separate sections for key areas such as the VIP preparation, pollworker recruiting, voter transactions and absentee ballot processing. Process flow – The structure recognizes the flow of transactions and materials and seeks to limit handoffs and process break points. For example, all absentee ballot processing is unified within one unit. All warehouse, inventory and distribution functions are unified. Adequate number of skilled managers – The structure can be implemented with a minimum of recruiting. Only 2 of 19 managerial, professional or supervisorial positions need to be recruited. Existing staff can fill the remaining positions. Ease of implementation – 12 of the 17 staffpersons considered for positions within the structure would have to be reclassified to reflect their role and responsibility within the organization. The Department should begin the process of reclassifying staff as soon as possible. Note 1: These benchmark comparisons compared counties based on the number of registered voters and voter transactions per FTE. Based on these benchmarks, San Francisco should have between 26 and 28 permanent staff. We selected the higher figure given that the Department of Elections is a standalone agency whereas many of the peer agencies were combined with other functions such as the Recorder and could share administrative resources.

14. Recommendations - Organizational structure • Proposed organizational structure

15. Recommendations - Organizational structure • Recommended organizational structure (continued) • Acceptance by key stakeholders – This is difficult to determine but given the extreme nature of the challenges facing the Department, due attention should be given to the need to formalize the structure. Preliminary discussions and reviews by the City’s Human Resources Department were favorable. • Fit with existing IT systems – The proposed organizational structure should be able to be implemented with minimal changes to the IT systems (if any). Description of organizational units Administrative Services Division – This Division would be led by a Deputy Director assisted by two analysts. The Division would perform budget, personnel, contracting and purchasing functions. IT Services Division – This Division, led by an IT Director supported by three analysts or management assistants, would be in charge of network administration, applications management (primarily the DIMS system) and special IT-oriented projects such as GIS or maintaining the vote uplink system. Voter Services Division – This would be led by a Deputy Director supported by two Section Supervisors. Voter Transactions Section – Responsible for processing election transactions such as affidavits, voter address changes, petition and nomination signatures. This Section should be co-located with the Absentee Processing Section so that staff from both Sections can back each other up depending on workload. Pollworkers/Polling Locations Section – This Section would be responsible for recruiting, training, deploying, evaluating and paying pollworkers and recruiting polling locations including ensuring that locations are ADA compliant. In addition, the Section would be responsible for operating the eight vote tally uplink sites.

16. Recommendations - Organizational structure Description of organizational units (continued) Candidate Services Division – This Division would be led by a Deputy Director and supported by two Section Supervisors. Campaign/Candidate Services Section – This Section would be responsible for candidate filing, campaign finance reporting, nominations and operation of the phone bank during election time. VIP/Ballot Design/Mapping Section – This Section would be responsible for preparation of the Voter Information Pamphlet or VIP, design of ballot stock, relations with printing vendors and precincting. Logistics/Absentee Division – This Division would be led by a Deputy Director and be supported by three Section Supervisors. Inventory/ Ballot Processing Section – This Section would be responsible for storing, staging, deploying and cleaning supplies, supply bins, voting machines, voting booths, ballots and related materials. This Section would also be responsible for receipt, storage, staging and distribution of ballots to precincts and associated supplies. Inventory/ Canvass Section – This Section would be responsible for post-election canvass. This Supervisor would also share inventory and warehouse responsibilities with the other Section Supervisor. Absentee Processing Section – This Section would handle absentee voting-related transactions such as AV requests and returned AV ballots. The Section would work with staff in the Ballot Processing Section to ensure that absentee ballots are processed according to statutory deadlines and handle post office relations. The Absentee Processing Section should be co-located with the Voter Transactions Section so that the staff of the two sections can back each other up depending on the workload.

17. Recommendations - Facilities • Recommended Facility Plan • The Department of Elections, in association with the Department of Real Estate and the City Architect, should consolidate facilities from the present six sites down to three. Four sites should be vacated or closed: • 240 Van Ness, • Pier 29, • Cor-o-Van Storage, and • Brooks Hall. • Two sites should be retained: • City Hall – Future use limited to campaign and candidate services and early voting. • Simba storage facility in Alameda until, and if, a comparable space can be located in the City or on the peninsula. This facility would continue to serve as off-site archival storage. • A new Elections Operations Center should be opened. The Center would accommodate all election functions except those housed within Simba and City Hall. The Center would house the election administration functions such as voter transactions, recruiting and outreach but also have adequate warehousing, processing and staging areas to handle ballots, supplies and voting equipment. Based on a complement of 28 full-time permanent staff and a projected workforce of 100 temporary workers, the administrative area of the Operations Center would require approximately 10,000 square feet. It is difficult to estimate the needs of the warehouse and processing areas because the current space that is used is so substandard. Based on observations from other counties, as much as 30,000 to 40,000 sf could be required. An ideal site for an Operations Center would be ADA-compliant, have a loading dock at truck bed level, sufficient parking and easy ingress/egress for precinct workers to pick up ballots and supplies, adequate access to BART and MUNI, adequate wiring to support the telecom and computing needs of the Department and sufficient floor space to accommodate the processing of ballot, voting machines and supplies. The Department is currently working with the City’s Real Estate Management office to identify and negotiate for a new Operations Center. A few sites have been researched but currently no negotiations have been commenced for any site. A promising site at 945 Bryant Street, in the SOMA area, has been identified as meeting many of the criteria. The floor diagrams and material flow diagrams on the following pages are based on the Bryant Street site assuming that will be the presumptive site selected by the City.

18. Recommendations - Facilities • First floor • The first floor would be dedicated to all supplies, machinery and materials associated with precinct voting. This would include: • Eagle voting machines (or touchscreen devices in the future), • Ballots, • Supply bins, • Supplies, and • Booths, tables and chairs. • The floor space would be used for the following processes: • Storage of machines and supplies, • Logic testing of voting machines, • Assembly of supply/ballot deliveries for precincts, and • Check-in of precinct inspectors and distribution of voting supplies, ballots.

19. Recommendations - Facilities Second floor The second floor would be dedicated to all supplies and materials associated with absentee voting and for mail sorting. This would include: • Ballots, • Supplies, and • Envelopes. The floor space would be used for the following processes: • Storage of absentee supplies, • Storage of absentee ballots prior to staging, • Staging of absentee ballots, envelopes and supplies, • Assembly of absentee ballot packets, • Quality control checking of packets, • Distribution of completed absentee packets to the Post Office, and • Sorting of all incoming mail.

20. Recommendations - Facilities • The third floor of 945 Bryant Street can serve as the administrative component of the Operations Center. • The administrative center should be designed according to the final configuration of interior walls, wiring and improvements. Any site selected for the administrative function should incorporate the following features. • The site should include private offices for the Director of Elections, the five Deputy Directors and the Executive Assistant. • Four contiguous rooms should be configured for the following functions related to early voting and processing absentee ballots: • Receiving, sorting and staging of returned absentee ballots, • Absentee Processing and Voter Transactions Sections where absentee ballots are validated after being returned from voters, • A secure area where absentee ballots can be tallied and stored prior to and after tallying. This room should also have a window for public viewing, and • A public counter for greeting and serving voters who drop by for early voting or to pick up affidavits. The building should have security features such as locked entrances, security badges worn by staff, security cameras in areas where ballots are stored or processed (cameras can film to tape rather than be monitored live), and locked rooms for storing ballots (especially voted absentees). A large conference room should be configured for precinct worker training and for conducting the post-election canvass. The room should be locked and guarded during the canvass process. In addition to the viewing window in the room used for tallying absentee ballots, other security arrangements should be made for hosting election observers on election eve and catering to the needs of the media.

21. Additional recommendations • Developing a Strategic Plan • While the organizational and management structure of the Department is stabilizing, the Elections Commission and Department should conduct a strategic planning process to establish a Department-wide focus on key issues and strategies and establish a five-year direction for the agency as it develops and matures. Key components of the strategic plan would include: • The role of the Commission once key personnel issues are addressed, • Exorcising politics from elections administration, • The future technology direction of the agency particularly in regard to voting systems, • How the agency will contend with the dramatic growth in absentee voting, • Strategies for recruiting, training and deploying pollworkers, • Staff development, and • Strengthening the organization’s structure.

22. Appendix 1 - Election commission rules in peer cities • Pursuant to a request from the Commission, we surveyed other jurisdictions regarding the authorizing laws for election commissions in those cities. The following pages include the laws for two peer cities that responded: • Chicago • New York City