Ed. Note:  This piece by our friend Steven Hill was first published at BeyondChron.com.

Community Leaders Accuse Chronicle of Attacks on Minority Representation

In a hard-hitting exposé, two community leaders from the Bay Area have accused the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chamber of Commerce of attacks on political reforms that have boosted minority representation. Writing for the New America Media, a collaboration of over 2000 ethnic news organizations across the United States, Esperanza Tervalon-Daumont, executive director of Oakland Rising and Alicia Garza, co-executive director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) in San Francisco, have criticized the Chronicle and Chamber for their current campaign to repeal political reforms like ranked choice voting and public financing of campaigns that have resulted in greater minority representation (see “Reforms That Helped Elect Candidates of Color in SF, Oakland Under Attack.”)

Ranked choice voting (RCV, also known as instant runoff voting) allows voters to rank their first-, second- and third- choice candidates when they cast their ballots for city officials, thus avoiding costly runoff elections. In last November’s mayoral election in Oakland, RCV helped Jean Quan overcome a 4-to-1 spending disadvantage by the favored candidate, former Senate pro tem and state powerbroker Don Perata, to become the first Asian-American woman directly elected mayor of a major U.S. city. In San Francisco, RCV and public financing have helped elect the most diverse Board of Supervisors in the city’s history. Currently, 8 out of 11 supervisors are people of color, including four Asians (three of whom are Chinese); three are female and two are openly gay. Since RCV and public financing became the law, the number of ethnic minorities elected to the Board of Supervisors has doubled.

“What do the Chronicle and the Chamber of Commerce have against representation from communities of color?” ask Tervalon-Daumont and Garza in their article. They provide an account of the Chronicle’s recent reporting, showing that the Chronicle has published more than three dozen articles, columns and blog posts since the November 2010 election highlighting RCV, many with a negative slant. One column calling for repeal of RCV was written by the Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Another recent anti-RCV article, featured on the top of page one as the Chronicle’s lead story, was based on a methodologically dubious poll commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce, a known RCV opponent. In that poll, a confusing question unsurprisingly led most respondents to say “I don’t know” which was then spun as evidence of massive voter confusion (one close source says that the Chamber refused to release other polling results that showed RCV in a positive light).

Not coincidentally, “voter confusion” is one of the claims that the San Francisco Chronicle has consistently featured in its anti-RCV reporting. Yet the Chronicle has entirely ignored the fact that a highly respected research organization at San Francisco State University has conducted exit polls following two different RCV elections and both showed the same result – 87% of respondents said they “understood” RCV. And those positive results cut across all ethnic and racial lines. The Chronicle also ignored an exit poll conducted by the Asian Law Caucus which had similar findings as the SFSU polls. “Wouldn’t those SFSU polls have been worth a mention in an article about voter confusion?” ask Tervalon-Daumont and Garza in their article. “If the Chronicle truly believes RCV is confusing, why didn’t it publish more articles aimed at educating voters before last November’s election?”

Their article also connects the dots to reveal the collusion between the Chronicle and the Chamber of Commerce by pointing out that the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Steve Falk, is the Chronicle’s former publisher. In addition, the Chronicle’s current president, Mark Adkins, is on the Chamber’s board of directors, a type of interlocking directorship that is frowned upon by media watchdogs.

A doubling of minority representation is not the only “RCV positive” that the Chronicle has ignored. Tervalon-Daumont and Garza point out that ranked choice voting has significantly boosted voter turnout, especially in communities of color. In the November 2010 election for Oakland’s mayor that elected Jean Quan, nearly 119,000 voters participated, compared to 84,000 voters in the June 2006 mayoral election. That’s a huge increase of 42% in voter turnout (see this report on the Oakland election, and this one on turnout in city council districts, which all saw large increases in voter turnout). By holding the decisive election in November, when minority voters turn out in far greater numbers to vote for president and governor than they do in June elections, a lot more Oaklanders voted in the mayoral contest.

In the 34 races held in San Francisco since the first RCV elections in 2004, nearly all of them have seen more voters participating in the final RCV tally than in the old December runoffs. A study of the 2005 Assessor Recorder’s race found that RCV had increased citywide voter participation in the decisive round of that race by 168%, or 120,000 voters more than likely would have voted in a December runoff. Moreover, the study found that voter participation tripled in six of the poorest and most minority neighborhoods due to having a RCV election in November rather than a December runoff. In short, a lot more voters in San Francisco and Oakland are having a say in who their local elected officials are, and that has been especially true for ethnic minorities. Yet the Chronicle has never reported on any of this.

Tervalon-Daumont and Garza also point out that ranked choice voting has been good for communities of color because the ranked ballots allow these communities to build coalitions and prevent vote-splitting if there are multiple minority candidates. For example, RCV allowed four major Latino candidates to run in San Francisco’s District 9 supervisorial race in 2008. Under the old December runoff system, the four Latino candidates likely would have split the Latino vote. But with RCV, voters were able to rank several of those candidates on their ballot. In 2010 in San Francisco’s District 10 race, an African-American candidate won by picking up the second and third rankings from many of the supporters of other black, Asian and white candidates in a district that historically has elected a black supervisor. In the 2005 assessor recorder’s race, people feared that the Asian vote would split between Phil Ting and Ron Chun, but that didn’t happen when Ting won by picking up second rankings from most Chun supporters.

In short, minority voters and their candidates have preserved the voting cohesiveness of their communities by making smart, strategic use of ranked ballots. That ability will be particularly important in the November 2011 mayoral election in San Francisco where there are three Asian candidates running – State Senator Leland Yee, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, and Board of Supervisors president David Chiu. If San Francisco was still using the old December runoff system, write Tervalon-Daumont and Garza – which the San Francisco Chronicle and Chamber of Commerce want to go back to – there is no doubt that the Asian vote would split among these three candidates, possibly resulting in none of them making a separate runoff. “To prevent that from happening, the Asian community would have already seen all sorts of backroom wheeling and dealing,” they write, “as powerbrokers twisted arms to keep two of those candidates out of the race. But with RCV, all of them can run—generating unprecedented excitement in the Asian community. Whichever candidate proves strongest will emerge with the most Asian first-, second- and third-place votes.”

I asked nearly a dozen San Francisco Chronicle editors and reporters to respond to these pointed accusations from these minority leaders. I specifically asked them why their articles had never mentioned the fact that ethnic minority representation on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has doubled since the onset of RCV and public financing of campaigns. I’ve always thought that the Chronicle employs a few decent reporters, yet not a single one of them was able to articulate a coherent response to that very specific question. Instead, one editor at the Chronicle got very defensive and testy, calling the charge “nonsensical” and saying my e-mail to her was “unprofessional and attacking.”

Tervalon-Daumont and Garza concluded, “Apparently the Chronicle does not value diversity and broad representation.” That’s putting it mildly. In fact, the Chronicle’s masthead, editorial office, columnists and newsroom are still for the most part as white as the Pillsbury Dough Boy. So it should be no surprise that communities of color see the Chronicle as not very “representative” of the diversity of the Bay area. Which is a shame, because this region badly needs a good daily newspaper. San Francisco is the 12th largest city in the nation by population, but the Audit Bureau of Circulation ranks the Hearst-owned Chronicle 24th in the nation in circulation. So the Chronicle is clearly punching far below its weight when it comes to selling its newspaper. Indeed, the Chronicle is a mere shadow of its former self, having lost half of its readership since 2004, with a whopping 26% loss in 2009 alone, reportedly the largest percentage drop in circulation of any major newspaper in the United States.

While many newspapers have lost readership to online news sources, I really believe that the Chronicle’s ill fortunes also stem from the fact that it is so woefully out of touch with the broad array of communities that inhabit this region. The demographics of the Bay Area are changing rapidly, and the Chronicle would receive a desperately needed boost in its readership if these diverse communities thought the Chronicle reflected their interests. Look at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — 8 out of 11 members are ethnic minorities. Do the Chronicle editors and reporters really think their newspaper reflects the values and priorities of this city’s diverse communities as much as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, elected by ranked choice voting?

If the Chronicle can’t figure out how to represent and serve this region, it might as well go the way of newspaper dinosaurs like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, another Hearst-owned daily, and the Rocky Mountain News (Denver), which not that long ago closed up daily operations and shriveled to online-only newspapers.

[Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is a political writer and columnist whose books include “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age” and “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy.” His op-eds and articles have been published by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the Guardian, Financial Times, The Nation, Beyond Chron, and many others, including the San Francisco Chronicle.]