♪ >> hello, and welcome to the department of elections right choice voting instructional video. it is part of the department of elections right choice voting outreach campaign and is designed to educate san francisco rig franciscoht choice voting. today we will learn what it is and who is elected using this voting method. we will also talk about with the ranked joyce l. looks like and how to market correctly. finally, we will see how the ranked joyce voting process works and to you an example of

an election using ranked choice of voting. so, what is ranked joyce voting? in march 2002 san francisco voters adopted a charter to implement ranked choice of voting, also known as instant runoff voting. san francisco voters will use it to elect most local officials by selecting a first choice candidate in the first column on the ballot and deborah second and third choice candidates in the second and third columns resect to do -- respectively. this makes it possible to elect local officials with the majority of votes. more than 50% without the need for a second runoff election. in san francisco, ranked choice of voting is for the election of members of the board of supervisors, the mayor, sharon, just -- district attorney, city attorney, treasurer, this is a recorder, and public defender.

ranked joyce voting does not apply to elections for local school and community college board members. number the election of state or federal officials. ranked choice of voting does not affect the adoption ballot measures. when voters received their ballot, either at a polling place or an absentee ballot in the mail, it will consist of multiple cards. voters will receive cards with contests for federal and state offices, as well as for state propositions and local ballot measures. for ranked choice voting contest, voters will receive a separate ranked choice ballot card. it will have instructions to rank three choices, which is new. the ranked choice ballot is designed in the side by side column format that lists the names of all candidates in each of the three columns. when marking the ranked choice

ballot, voters elect their first choice in the first column by completing the aero pointing to their choice. for their second choice, voters selected different wind by completing the arab pointing to their choice in the second column. for their third choice, voters elect a different candidate by completing the arrow pointing to their choice. voters wishing to vote for qualified write-in candidate can write it in on the line provided. and they must complete the arrow pointing to their choice. keep in mind, it voters should select a different candidate for each of the three columns of the ranked choice ballot card. if the voters elect the same candidate in more than one column, his or her vote for that candidate will count only once. also, a voter's second choice will be counted only if his or her first choice candidate has been eliminated. and a voter's third choice will

be counted only if both his or her first and second choice candidates have been eliminated. we have talked about how to mark the ranked choice ballot. now let's look at how ranked choice of voting works. initially, every first choice vote is a candidate. any candidate that receives a majority, more than 50% of the first choice to vote, is determined to be the winner. if no candidate receives more than 50% of the first choice votes, a process of eliminating candidates and transferring votes begins. first, the candidate who received the fewest numbers of first choice votes is eliminated from the race. second, voters who selected the eliminated candidate as their first choice will have their vote to transfer to their second choice. there, all the votes are recounted. fourth, if any candidate receives more than 50% of the

votes, he/she is declared the winner. if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the process of eliminating candidates and transferring votes is repeated until one candidate has a winning majority. now let's look at an example of an election using ranked choice of voting. in this example, we have three candidates. candidate a, b, and c. after all the first choice votes are counted, none of the three candidates has received more than 50%, or a majority of the first choice vote cast. candidate a g-205% ofb the votes% received 40%. and c received 35% of the boats. because no candidate received a majority, the candidate who received the fewest number of first choice votes, a candidate a, is eliminated from the race.

voters to pick a candidate a as their first choice candidate will have their but transferred to their second choice. and the voters to pick and a, 15% chose candidate b as their second choice, and 10% chose c as their second choice. these votes are then applied to b and c, and the votes are recounted. candidate b now has 55% of the votes. candidate c as 45%. candidate b has more than 50% of the votes and is determined as the winner. >> thank you for watching. we hope you have ranked choice learned ranked choice of voting and was elected. you have seen the ballot, learned how to market, and learned how the voting process works. if you have any further questions about ranked choice voting, please contact us at

department of elections, city hall, room 48, 1 dr. carlton be good lit place, sentences go, california, 94102. or 415-554-4375. visit our website, www.sfelections.org.

mayor lee: thank you, everybody, for coming. i have asked for the roundtable because oftentimes, information about what we're doing this not get expressed in much detail for a lot of the emerging news outlets, so i wanted a special time with the asian roundtable press just to make sure you can get your questions answered about what we're doing and in particular, i wanted to talk

about our pension reform, which is one of the most important things that i think i can contribute to the city as the mayor, and of course, what we're putting on the ballot in addition to that this november would be the street repaving bond. i will begin with the pension reform first and then talk about the bond and attempt to answer any questions you have about things we're doing throughout my administration. in january, as you recall, i announced five high priorities, and pension reform was one of them. at the time, we looked at the numbers, how the cost of the city employees' pension was impacting our city fund. the to over $225 million a year had to be set aside just to pay for the increase in cost of pensions, and the tensions had to do with both the pension

costs as well as the health care costs, and none of the health care costs have any coverage at all in our current budget. so i had to go to work on that very hard. we knew that it was going to take months and months of discussions, but we approached it in a way learning from what had happened last year in proposition b, as you recall, it was a proposition that mr. adachi had proposed. it went to the november ballot and got defeated in a very sound way. as a city employee for 21 years, i observed very closely what happened, and he, of course, and bird so many san francisco employees -- angered so many send francisco employees. janitors, street cleaners, fire, police -- they all in very

large voices resoundingly helped to defeat the proposal because they felt it was done in a way in which they were never included in that discussion. it was their lives, their pension that they feel that they earned in the city that they love, so they asked us, that they were willing to cut and support a pension reform that would increase their contributions, if it was done the right way. we asked what the right way is, and they said the right way was to include all the unions and make sure it is something that they can pay attention to, that they understand and will participate in, so we did that in a very different way. we met with all the unions and discovered that the unions were very willing to give up more, to pay more into the pension program, so that the burden on the city's general fund would not be as great. we went about telling them what

we had to do, and we created a pension reform measure that was flexible, that whenever the increase in cost went up because the investments were not as good, their cost of contribution would go up simultaneously. but they would also -- and this is a very important point -- when times are good and our investments do good, we pay less as a city into the fund. they pay less into the city, so they enjoy the good times, but they also share in the bad times. that flexibility is called the flow -- float in our charter, and that is a big distinction with the alternative proposal that is still being marketed by mr. adachi. it is important for you to know that. that distinction called vested

rights. many cities across the country -- when they have not considered the employees' pension has a vested right, they get into legal trouble very quickly. that is why you see litigation around the country sponsored by employee groups who have never been consulted with, being demanded that they pay more into the pension, but there is no consideration of their vested rights. that concept is embedded in our measure were in good and bad times, we share, so they get something out of this reform. because they get something out of it, they are vested in it. the unions continue to view, as i do, that the alternative proposal being sponsored by mr. adachi does not consider vested rights and therefore will be litigated. in that litigation, there is a

great chance in my opinion that the proposal will lose. i am not the city attorney, but if you ask the city attorney, as we have -- and we have that assurance -- that if you do not consider the vested rights, there will be potentially successful litigation against it, so i wanted you to know that. that is a point i continue to make. it takes a little time to understand the, but it is one where if you understand the world of public pension improvement reform, and that is why we have such heated debates in oakland and in san jose. very heated. the first thing the unions say is they will sue if we tried to logos on us without consideration, and now, everything is being settled. if you go into the details of the settlements, you will

so i am speaking to in my lawyer had on. i also think our proposal is important to consider because we have employees agreeing to pay into their health-care trust fund for the first time. they have a date certain to pay andin, so that is another contribution being made. the employee making under $50,000, they would not a book to -- they would not be required to pay the increase. but as they increase their wages, then we have two more level where they contribute more and more, as the year's increase. that helps us in the millions of dollars with this. our proposal will increase the

contributions to the pension by between $800 million and $1 billion. it is comprehensive in that it ends pension spiking, increases the retirement age, both for public safety as well as miscellaneous. i am part of that miscellaneous category. so i have to work more years now to earn the full pension, which i do not mind. it also covers all employee classifications. apparently, mr. apachdachi's proposal leaves out the sheriff's. we cover everybody. we are not clear as to why he had done that.

as i mentioned earlier, the health care costs are there, all the classifications are covered. we pay into the health care cost. one of the most important things is we have the every bit of 99.9% of all unions. we are still working with sciu to get agreement. we still have some things under dialogue. they want me to figure out a problem that they have that has nothing to do with pensions. we believe we have figured it out and we will be speaking with them the next two weeks to get an agreement. i think our hard work and resulted in a lot of confidence with the unions. the unions themselves are strong in this proposal. i have to thank them, time and

again. i saw leadership coming out of a union to say we will not allow the city to be forced to consider pension reform without us. i thank them for that because this is the way that i used to do business in the city, doing business with the people involved. if you work with people, -- it has been my management style for 20 years -- he will get more out of those people that if you just forced them to do work that you know they have a problem with even as we approach muni, at this time of mayor, we are going to talk to the drivers and breed cried into what they do every day, even though we have to get more from them in terms of performance. i want the 85% on-time performance. they have issued that they need help to resolve. people get in the way of the buses, do all sorts of things to

keep them from blowing. it is my style, as mayor, to work with people to find the best solution. to me, it is not about compromise. it is the way you do business. you are going to affect people's lives with pension. it is the best policy to work with people, and that is why we have the consensus good policy. the second idea of the bond measure, the $248 million bond that we have for street repaving in november, is also important. we are making up for bad decisions in the past. i am not going to blame either the mayor, board, but in combination, all of us did not do good things in the path to invest in our infrastructure. one of the things i spent the most time on in my prayer job as city administrator was putting

together a 10-year capital infrastructure plan for the city. it is now four years old. we have been disciplining all of our capital infrastructure work in a better way. when we pass construction bonds, we have honored timeline for that. we are no locker telling people we ran out of money. we are doing better on a project it the last time we ran out of money on an art project was lebanon on that. that was not planned under the 10-year capital plan. the libraries are coming in on time, the parts that we are finishing up. everything is being designed for accurately, and the engineering of those things are more accurate, and we are holding contractors accountable for all the things they are doing so we do not run out of money. when we do that kind of

discipline, we can promise the voters and property owners in the city, that your property taxes will not go up. 1996 was the last time that they went up. for this street repaving, we are making the same promise. we will not increase property taxes with this bond. that is a promise embedded in the language. we need this money because half of our 850 miles of streets are in very poor conditions. if we do not take care of that now in a massive way, we are going to pay five times more if we delay. that is something i need to avoid, something that i need to take total responsibility for putting forward now and making sure i'd make the best effort to make her we need to pass this

bond. this will give us three full years of back some street repaving capacity. those three years of capacity will aim all of the construction at the worst streets in the city. it will also make sure every supervisory district gets a fair share of those dollars so that you do not have people in carmen chu's district saying, how about my streets? it will be equally distributed. there is a geographical equity clause in the bond that says everybody gets a fair share. we just will pick the worst streets in their district to work on. the benefits of working on those streets, or threfor three years

it is at a total capacity for what dpw can do. after three years, we do not want to come back with another big bond. what we would like to try to do is get the street repaving back to the general fund. build up the general fund so that it can cover the streets. it may at the 100%, so we are looking at taking back the vehicle license fee that the state now has. they use it for everything but our streets. we need to take that local decision and get our vehicle license fee back to our streets. the combination of those two will colon -- continue to allow us to have a good pot of money to continue maintaining the streets at a high level. but these three years will only keep us at the current level. it will not get us into a better

place because of all of the backlog of streets in disrepair. i want to make sure that we have done enough so that it does not increase fivefold, if we did not do anything. that is the danger. i am spending my saturday -- weekends -- talking to neighborhood groups about pension reform, the street repaving bond. those are two important things we are doing. we will also be introducing a half cent sales tax to take the place of the state's inability to get theirs. as you know, july 1, the law changed. the sales tax would down from 9.5 to 8.5. we are asking for a half a percent increase to cover but the state is going to impose on us. it is a safety thing for us.

i do not call it an increase. we called it a safety sales tax, something that restores half of what we gained. that will help us with money that i had to use to balance the budget this year. i had to get into the reserves. i want to build up those reserves and be prepared for one or two more years of bad economic times for the city and county. i have to be smart about that. i hope the public understands, we're not increasing the sales tax, we are just trying to get half a percent back. to me, that is a lot of work between now and november, meeting with the different resident councils, neighborhood associations. if you see me, which you will, i