Your school-board ballot could look a whole lot different in November

In a 6-1 vote Tuesday, the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education agreed to explore four alternatives to its current citywide elections following a petition claiming the district was in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001.

The board has until May 17 to decide how to respond to a Jan. 2 letter from Walnut Creek attorney Scott Rafferty, who alleges that racial minorities don’t have equal power to elect candidates of their choosing.

The school board argues it is in compliance with the law, but it voted Tuesday to examine alternatives to the current system: district-based, cumulative, limited or ranked-choice voting. The CVRA does not require district-level elections for compliance, as recommended by Rafferty.

Whether the district chooses to fight the lawsuit or change its election administration, it will spend taxpayer dollars at a time when it faces a looming deficit, declining enrollment and an overhaul of its math and literacy curricula. The school board also voted Tuesday to reintroduce Algebra 1 to the eighth grade.

“This is a critical time for SFUSD, and our Board must remain focused on ensuring educational excellence for our students and a sustainable future for the district,” Board of Education President Lainie Motamedi said in a statement Wednesday. “The Board is committed to ensuring fair and just elections.”

Commissioner Kevine Boggess, the sole vote in favor of complying with Rafferty’s demands rather than exploring alternatives, said the district should take the “safest route” to minimize financial risk and prioritize students.

“Given the fact that we are getting ready to experience reductions across our district, as well as trying to deal with a structural deficit of above $100 million, it’s hard for me to take any steps that would potentially put funds away from the classroom, away from learning [and] away from having staff,” Boggess said prior to Tuesday’s vote.

How elections could change

Following a San Francisco Chronicle investigation that revealed a small group of

for CVRA noncompliance in the past decade, Rafferty wrote to the district pointing out possible violations of the law. Under the law, plaintiffs who identify violations can be awarded attorney’s fees, and

rather than face lengthy, expensive legal challenges.

Rafferty said it was “all but inevitable” that SFUSD would be next as one of the largest districts that still uses citywide, or at-large, elections.

In his petition for CVRA compliance, Rafferty claimed that his research establishes both racially polarized voting — in which minority groups’ voting preferences differ substantially from the majority — and a district, or by-trustee, election map that would give a protected class more ability to elect their preferred candidate than the current at-large system.

If a lawsuit commences, it would be up to a judge to determine whether Rafferty’s research meets the criteria.

If the district were to adopt by-trustee elections, the school board would hire a demographer to assist in both the public hearing process and mapping of trustee area boundaries. Rafferty recommends this method as the best course of action.

“On any controversial issue, such as Algebra, every constituent has to communicate to every commissioner — which they can only do during the one-minute public comment allowed tonight,” Rafferty wrote in an email to The Examiner. “All seven commissioners are accountable to all SF voters, which means they are not really accountable to anyone. A multi-million dollar citywide recall is the only recourse — and that can’t be allowed to become the norm.”

“Seven areas will make every commissioner accountable and, if necessary, recallable by a smaller group of people at much lower cost to the District,” he wrote.

opposition to district elections

While Rafferty said he believes diverse representation is derived from neighbors elected by neighbors, SF Parent Action and other public commenters urged the board to look at its current makeup, arguing it is already representative of San Francisco’s diverse population.

In a Feb. 11 statement, SF Parent Action pointed to The City’s Board of Supervisors, which has used district elections since 2000 and has consistently featured more white elected officials than the Board of Education.

“Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos are represented at higher percentages on the Board than in the general public,” SF Parent Action wrote. “We support the goal of maintaining a diverse and representative school board, but we see no evidence that transitioning to district elections would bring us any closer to this goal than we already are.”

In response, Rafferty said that it’s not the current makeup of the board that he is concerned about, but the voters. A board elected by its neighbors, he added, would result in a board that is not only diverse but that includes a dedicated voice for each neighborhood.

Mayor London Breed echoed another concern of constituents in her statement ahead of Tuesday’s meeting when she asked who a family would be represented by if it lives in one district and sends its kids to school in another. Joining SF Parent Action, she urged the board to consider alternatives.

Commissioner Lisa Weissman-Ward’s amendment to Tuesday’s resolution reflected those alternatives, citing the latest update to the CVRA — the California Supreme Court’s August 2023 opinion in Pico Neighborhood Association v. City of Santa Monica, which mentions the four possible alternative systems.

other options

Under a cumulative election system, each voter would receive as many votes as there are candidates and can use the votes any way they like, such as casting multiple votes for a single candidate. Limited voting is similar, except voters receive fewer votes than there are candidates, but usually more than one.

Ranked-choice voting, by contrast, gives voters the opportunity to rank candidates in order of preference. According to FairVote, a nonprofit organization focused on education and advocacy around election reforms, a candidate would have to receive more than 50% of the votes to be elected.

However, if no candidate receives a majority, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated. Their votes are then distributed based on the second choice of those who voted for the eliminated candidate.

Proportional ranked-choice voting differs only slightly in that instead of a majority, candidates would have to pass a certain threshold. For four seats, that would mean 21% of the vote. Any surplus vote after a candidate surpasses the threshold would be divided among the remaining candidates according to their second choice, and so on, until four candidates have crossed the threshold.

“If vote dilution is occurring and the school board changes its election method, proportional ranked-choice voting or the other proportional methods that are allowed under the CVRA would help these groups elect a number of representatives in proportion to their share of the vote,” said Deb Otis, FairVote’s Director of Research and Policy.

“Elections could still be held citywide rather than in districts,” she said. “But instead of having to cross that majority threshold 50% in order to get a seat, you can win a seat with a smaller fraction that gets more groups at the table.”

In light of Rafferty’s challenge, Otis said FairVote will conduct its own analysis of the election alternatives to determine whether racially polarized voting exists and to what degree.

She also said the organization would also look at the geographic distribution of minority communities to see if districts could work well for securing representation.

Ultimately, it will be up to the board members to decide whether they want to risk a lawsuit to keep their at-large elections or switch to a new system for the 2024 election.