A New Tool Promises to Parse San Francisco's Political Noise Issues
San Francisco’s primary election is next Tuesday, and with less than a week to go, the Department of Elections reports about 53,000 ballots turned in so far. The last presidential primary in 2020 boasted a turnout of over 60%. This election has complex down-ballot issues, and voters are taking their time.
“Election Day and toward the close of voting tend to bring a surge of activity,” Department of Elections chief John Arntz told us in an email. “With many ballots yet to be cast, many vote-by-mail ballots could still be delivered by the USPS and voters using drop boxes and polling places.”
At least some of those down-ballot issues are confounding voters. Proposition B, which claims to be a plan for hiring more police, is the object of multimillion-dollar campaign spending even though it likely won’t have any real impact if passed, and a recent poll shows voters deadlocked on the issue.
Then there's the whole inside-baseball, farm-team battle over control of the local Democratic Party that’s becoming a bellwether for November’s Ragnarok over who gets to be mayor and supervisor. Amid all this, voters must deal with a firehose of factoids from the proliferation of political front groups, often glossed over by overconsolidated local news sources.
That universe includes the pro-business Families Together for Abundant Abundance constellation of PACs that are the subject of multiple conspiracy theories. It also includes the self-officious Phoenix Justice League Alliance, whose collective agenda reveals a tremendous thirst to be the object of those same conspiracy theories. Genuine grassroots groups, business and neighborhood boosters, and think tanks orbit in the same belt.
But how exactly is the average voter expected to navigate all of this? Well, they’re not. Wherever they land on the rhetorical roulette wheel due to fatigue is what strategists always bet on.
An easy-to-use tool for the everyday, not-too-engaged voter who still wants to make informed decisions is sorely needed. A nonpartisan group called VoteSF may well have just the thing.
Helmed by Peter Darche, a data scientist, and Lyn Stoler, a public health and climate researcher, VoteSF has been developing a Recommender, still in the testing phase, with about 1,000 voters trying it out.
The project results from Darche and Stoler’s experience wading into the city’s grassroots politics and observing a sizable knowledge deficit between San Francisco’s enlarged chattering class and everyday people.
“It felt like there was both too much and too little participation,” Darche told us in an interview Tuesday. “There’s a ton of organization and activists and groups, but they represented a small proportion of the overall electorate […] if someone wasn't in one of those groups, they were very uninformed, disconnected from San Francisco politics.”
“One thing Peter had shared with me when we met was he's been doing this for numerous election cycles, and the biggest point of feedback he got was requests for different types of recommendations,” Stoler added. “This is a response to demand from voters; that was one of the first things I had asked for when we met, and I found out about his work.”
The Recommender, an online app you can try at https://recs.votesf.app, is easy to use. Visitors answer a small battery of eight policy choice questions based on current city issues, are asked for party affiliation, and are shown where they land in the city’s political archipelago (see above). They’re also given a list of endorsing groups that best align with them.
The statistical technique it uses is similar to that used for the Progressive Voter Index, first unveiled by Prof. Rich DeLeon at San Francisco State University in 1999, then built upon by David Latterman through the 2000s, and then updated by Latterman and Alex Lantsberg for the Chronicle in 2021.
When we tried the Recommender out, the results were accurate from the viewpoint of a frequent voter and former activist who routinely voted along factional lines, but there were some anomalies.
For instance, Supervisor Catherine Stefani, traditionally tarred as a center-right politician by progressives, ends up as their choice for Assembly. That’s probably due to her anomalous stance on Prop. B keeping her in the favor of labor and other groups in this election.
Running through the app as a left-leaning moderate, we found that not all of the “Democrats for Change” slate for Central Committee showed up; that may be due to San Francisco’s unique politics around housing, transit, and growth. “Transportation and housing are sort of horseshoe issues to some extent,” Darche noted.
By noting aligned representative advocacy groups and what they are about, the Recommender aims to help voters decode some of that context.
Darche and Stoler look forward to feedback from voters as they continue to work to improve the app.
“We're extremely receptive to it, whether that has to do with methodology or user experience, whatever it might be,” Stoler says. “This is an early version, and it's gonna continue to improve, and the more people engage with it, the better.”
I like the effort and intention behind this effort, but I think there should be more than 3 options per question. The housing question only has two which I find to be rather egregious given the complexity of that particular debate over the years. I hope to see more breadth and depth in options per question when the final product launches. 5 answer options per question would be solid and would better represent how the political spectrum operates with voters – socialists, progressives, moderates, libertarians, conservatives – rather than catering to the binary factional divide (Mods vs Progs) that's been a chronic disservice to San Francisco. That said, the tool was engaging and I think a lot of folks will find it useful! Thanks for the work.