A proposal that would switch San Francisco’s elections for mayor and other city offices from odd-numbered years to even ones is moving forward despite opposition from Mayor London Breed.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will decide whether to ask voters in November if they want to make the change, which would move the scheduled 2023 elections for mayor, sheriff, district attorney, city attorney and treasurer to 2024 and every four years thereafter.
Supervisor Dean Preston introduced the proposed ballot measure in May and it was advanced unanimously Wednesday by a three-member board committee. Preston and supporters of the idea are pushing it as a way to boost voter turnout while following the footsteps of other cities, such as Los Angeles and San Jose, that have already made the change.
“This is a really crucial voting rights measure, and the data from the past decade in San Francisco shows that even-year elections have achieved significantly higher voter turnout than the odd year elections,” Preston said. He pointed to the about 41% turnout the city saw in the November 2019 election, compared with about 86% turnout in the election one year later.
If voters switch the election schedule as Preston has envisioned, it would extend Breed’s current term by one year. Were she to be subsequently re-elected, she could end up serving about 10 and a half straight years as mayor, given that she first took the office in July 2018 after former Mayor Ed Lee’s unexpected death.
But Breed came out against the proposal in a letter last week to Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who chairs the rules committee that moved the measure forward. The mayor wrote that Los Angeles and San Jose each received input from locally-convened commissions before they decided to shake up their election schedules. She said she would support a similarly “thorough, independent, and objective accounting of possible solutions to improve voter turnout in San Francisco.”
“While I applaud and share the goal of increasing civic participation in municipal elections and remain open and willing to collaborate on legislation to achieve that end, I believe moving this Charter Amendment forward to the electorate’s consideration with the minimal public input it is set to receive is a mistake,” Breed wrote.
Preston’s camp thinks public opinion on the matter is already clear. After Wednesday’s favorable committee meeting, his office announced that a poll found that 74% of voters indicated support for the idea of even-year mayoral elections after hearing more information about the proposed ballot measure. The poll conducted by David Binder Research surveyed 600 likely November 2022 voters by phone and online and had a 4% margin of error.
“Any efforts to increase voter turnout and to have elections when the most people vote really is true democracy,” Peskin said at Wednesday’s committee meeting.
Preston also cited a 2015 California law, SB415, that sought to prevent cities from having off-cycle elections if doing so would lead to a turnout decline of 25% or more.
Redondo Beach challenged the law in court, arguing that it shouldn’t apply to charter cities, which are allowed under state law to have more control over their own affairs. An appellate court agreed, meaning that the law doesn’t currently require San Francisco to change its election schedule.
Preston said he wants to change that through his proposed amendment to San Francisco’s City Charter, arguing that while the city has led the way on may progressive areas, “on voting rights, we’ve actually fallen significantly behind.”
“This charter amendment is an opportunity to get us back on track and ensure that more San Franciscans participate in our local democracy,” he told his colleagues at the committee meeting.
J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris
