Scavenged ballot box lids haunt S.F. elections
Erin McCormick, Chronicle Staff Writer
Beachcombers find them on sand dunes west of Point Reyes. Rowers come upon them bobbing in the bay.
The bright red box tops that keep washing up around the Bay Area are floating reminders of a problem in San Francisco, the remnants of ballot boxes that somehow got beyond the control of the city's embattled Department of Elections.
The corrugated plastic ballot box lids, each marked with the city seal and the words "Provisional and Absentee Ballots," first raised the concerns of election watchdogs shortly after the city's November election, when eight of them were found near the Golden Gate Bridge by the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard vessel.
Since then, despite assurances from city elections Director Tammy Haygood that the box lids merely blew into the bay while election workers cleaned them on a city pier, the issue has resurfaced time and again.
As the lids keep being discovered farther and farther from San Francisco's shores, the lore around them has built, and they've become local collectors' items.
One now sits behind the bar at San Francisco's historic Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club. Another was made into a poster by artists in West Marin, yet another is being held in the offices of the Point Reyes Light newspaper.
At least three other discoveries have been reported -- with box lids turning up as far away as ocean beaches 15 miles north of San Francisco.
And the discoveries have continued to raise questions about the state of San Francisco's election system, which has been plagued by a seemingly never- ending string of problems in recent years, ranging from slow election returns and misprints in the official ballot book to stacks of uncounted ballots being discovered days after the election.
"Now I see why people in San Francisco are upset about their elections," said Dave Mitchell, editor and publisher of the Point Reyes Light, which has had two citizens come in to its offices with box lids found on Marin beaches. One kept the lid for the artwork.
"This makes me think that the way the election was handled down there was pretty sloppy," said Mitchell, whose little paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for public service journalism.
Elections Director Haygood has repeatedly said that, while her department made a regrettable error in accidentally letting the lids wash into the bay, no ballots were ever endangered.
Elections department spokesman Bill Strawn said 63 lids were missing and might have gone off the dock while being cleaned at the city's Pier 29 warehouse, where the department stores old ballots and voting equipment. Considering the strong tides and currents that govern local waters, he said, it's no surprise that they continue to appear on the region's beaches.
"Given the nature of the bay, we've expected that this would happen, and they would wash up one at a time," he said.
But many of those who find the lids are cynical about the explanation.
Last week, Marin artists Judith Selby and Richard Lang unveiled a poster featuring the crumpled, sand-covered ballot box lid that Selby found while combing Kehoe Beach, north of the Point Reyes lighthouse. "Cast your vote . . . Away," reads the poster in big block letters.
Selby says she intends to send the lid to state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and says she hopes he will conduct a thorough investigation of how the lids ended up in the water.
"I don't know what the truth is," she said. "But I never thought that ballot boxes needed to be washed. Were they dirty? What I hope is that (the state) will investigate and find out what happened."
In the rustic Aquatic Park headquarters of the Dolphin Club, a box lid has been lying behind the bar like a forgotten trophy ever since a rower rescued it from the middle of the bay early last month.
"We laughed about it for a while," said Lou Marcelli, 74, a longtime club swimmer who braves the bay's cold water three times a week. "But we don't get too excited about it. Everybody knows what happens in San Francisco elections."
The Department of Elections, which has gone through five directors in seven years, has faced constant criticism.
In November, Secretary of State Bill Jones completed a six-month investigation of the November 2000 election and reported finding significant irregularities in the vote counts in 21 precincts he surveyed.
In the November 2001 election, campaign participants complained about Haygood's decision to move absentee ballots from City Hall to nearby Bill Graham Civic Auditorium as a precaution against any anthrax contamination. They questioned whether the votes had been properly guarded to prevent tampering.
With a controversial public power measure losing by only 533 votes, participants also were alarmed in the days after the election when it was revealed that one precinct worker had walked off with 200 blank ballots, and 240 ballots had been discovered sitting uncounted in voting machines.
Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit group that monitors election issues, says voters deserve a more thorough explanation of what happened to the missing ballot box lids and why.
"A lot of people already feel incredibly cynical about San Francisco elections," she said. "The discovery of these lids only feeds that cynicism by suggesting that ballots are being thrown into the bay."