More Fraud Accusations for Lee Supporters
The Bay Citizen was on hand to see Friday's controversial Chinatown ballot operation
Once again, Interim Mayor Ed Lee's campaign is hit with accusations that his supporters are bending the law to get votes.
And, this latest twist, as eyewitness accounts and an online video show workers from an independent political group helping elderly Chinatown residents fill out their ballots for the Nov. 8 election, a familiar player emerges —the SF Neighbor Alliance.
On Friday morning, The Bay Citizen saw women from the group, an independent political organization supporting Lee's election campaign that is headed by Enrique Pearce, the consultant who made headlines for the initial "Run Ed Run" drive, working beneath a makeshift tent propped up on the sidewalk at the intersection of Pacific and Stockton Streets, in the heart of Chinatown.
As voters — mostly elderly Chinese — approached with their ballots, the workers, who wore blue “Ed Heads” T-shirts, helped them open their ballot envelopes and at times gave instructions on how to vote.
In some cases, the workers overlaid stencils — thin, transparent plastic panels with horizontal slits to help draw straight lines — on top of the ballots to guide the voters to vote. The workers put the ballots into plastic bags after they were completed.
John Arntz, the head of the San Francisco Elections Department, said Friday that the existing evidence did not amount to any wrongdoing although he has contacted the S.F. District Attorney's office on the matter.
“If a voter walks up to someone and says I need help marking my ballot and they get a stencil, that’s the voter’s choice,” Arntz said.
But the episode, Lee’s opponents say, has raised new questions about the well-organized, independent political operation backing Lee’s campaign. Since this summer, Pearce has been the target of sustained criticism from Lee’s rivals after he headed the “Run Ed Run” campaign to draft Lee into the race.
Jim Stearns, state Senator Leland Yee’s campaign strategist, accused the group of erecting an “an assembly line for mass ballot fraud.”
“You have lines of people waiting to be assisted in their voting, that looks like machine politics to me,” said Stearns.
David Chiu, a mayoral candidate challenging Lee and the district supervisor representing Chinatown, said he believed the "Run Ed Run" organization was behind the operation.
"When a concerned San Franciscan comes to me and says there is an alleged voter fraud going on in my district and that people are actually marking ballots for voters, you'd better believe we wanted to get to the bottom of it immediately," he said.
Several workers told a Bay Citizen reporter on Friday afternoon that they were volunteers simply helping educate senior citizens on the voting process. They said they handed voters lime-green papers printed with the slate of candidates endorsed by the Singtao Daily, a Chinese language newspaper, but denied instructing voters on how they should vote. (Singtao has endorsed Lee for mayor.)
Some became angry after repeated questioning and demanded that a reporter produce his press badge. And when approached by a Bay Citizen photographer, the workers quickly put ballots back into envelopes and covered up the stencils with sheets of paper.
“This is not illegal,” a volunteer who identified herself only as Wong said in Chinese. “We don’t fill out any ballots. We want to keep everything above board.”
Another volunteer, who declined to give her name, said they used stencils because “the elderly cannot see clearly.”
“We’re just volunteer helpers,” she said. “We’re not holding the pen; they are.”
A video capturing the scene, shot by a rival campaign staffer, was first published by the San Francisco Chronicle’s website on Friday evening.
Pearce did not respond to calls for comment. But in an interview with the Chronicle, he denied the operation was illegal and said the brouhaha was a “political hit by our opponents, pure and simple.”
Roland Salvato, a consultant, told The Bay Citizen on Friday that he was riding the 30 Stockton bus when he noticed a queue of elderly voters lining up at the tent and got off to investigate. He said he witnessed the Ed Headz workers filling out ballots for voters.
“They were actually filling out ballots for people, but I saw the other people filling out ballots for themselves,” Salvato said.
Salvato’s account could not be independently verified.
Tony Winnicker, a spokesman for Lee, said the mayor was “deeply troubled, if the accusations are true.”
Pearce’s group “should cease and desist immediately any activity that undermines confidence in the election or the voting process,” Winnicker said. “The right to vote is too important.”
Correction: Due to an editing error, a sentence about the stencils used by Lee supporters incorrectly stated that the stencils instructed votes to vote for Lee. While the stencils narrowed the ballot options to one candidate or proposition, it didn't specify which candidate or proposition.
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