take a look at. may be based on some of his comments we can look at that in terms of a system of voting that is not based on having a runoff, but also a way of calculating a specific way of carrying out an election, different from ranked joyce voting, where voters are able to talk about preferences. >> i would be more than happy to study any other system. let me know if this style has been used someplace else. i know there are some theoretical systems out there. those would be a little more difficult to actually study what they are, because it is a theory. it has not been put into place. you cannot say whether it is doing better or worse. i am more than happy to get into that discussion. i just want to make sure we are preparing current -- comparing current systems that are in use.

it is a reality that you cannot necessarily do the same empirical analysis -- supervisor avalos: i understand. i hope there is a use of this system elsewhere. it could be on another continent, a place called utopia, maybe. perhaps not a real place. >> more than happy to do whatever the commission wishes. chairperson campos: if i may, commissioners, whether it is at a meeting today or subsequent to the meeting, if you want to have a follow-up discussion with mr. fried, i want to make sure he is able to follow up on the specific issues or concerns that you may have. if there is something specifically that you think it is important that he looked at, if you can make sure that you let him know, whether it is today or any subsequent meetings, we want to make sure

the questions that the commissioners want answered are, in fact, answered. just a reminder that the point of this exercise by lafco is to provide information and make sure we have data that sheds light on this discussion. i think it makes sense to include the system the commissioner avalos raised. it makes sense to look at it. supervisor mar: i would be interested in how voting rights organizations look at how the systems impact is in french should -- disenfranchized groups. in 1986, we were looking at preference voting and how it operates in places like alamogordo, new mexico, and how

it impacted disenfranchised communities, whether ethnic or socioeconomic. that would be of interest to me. >> that is part of what i have been collecting data on, figuring out how we do that. in san francisco, unless you do a language-specific ballot, -- it is hard when you have a bunch of english pellets. in san francisco, there are corners of areas with a higher density of a certain population. it is not guaranteed all the people in that area are of that ethnicity. we are trying to figure out how we look at that fairly, so we are not attending the system by bringing other voters because the happen to live in the same neighborhood as a different ethnic group. the other thing i wanted to bring up on this matter -- i have also been listening to what the board of supervisors have been having some hearings on, on the election process.

i am going to bring in some of the questions being asked by some other members of the board that may not be on this commission, looking at whether there is a way to answer some of their questions, so we can have a full study of what the city is looking at in this process. chairperson campos: thank you. i know a number of members of the public are here to speak on this item. i look forward to their comments. if you can please come up, you each have three minutes. >> good afternoon, commissioners. i appreciate the opportunity to give a little more information.

i was with the san francisco voting task force. we spent a couple of years studying voting systems in particular. that report -- i think it is still available on the web. certainly, paper copies are available somewhere. that would give you a great overview of voting systems in general. we also discussed in that report ranked choice voting. there are a couple of high- level things. the most important thing to consider here is transparency. that is to get as many allies on the system, and the things that calculate the votes, as is possible. this is missing entirely with proprietary-owned vendor operating software systems. essentially, software is proprietary in protected by all manner of rights and secrecy, so nobody gets eyes on it, really.

even if it is open, there is a considerable amount of the scientific community that can look at the software code. they will object to looking at it, because of the legal liabilities associated with having looked at the proprietary software, and and creating something subsequently, and running into a problem of being accused of taking the software that may have looked at, using it to develop something new. in the report, you will note that what we recommend is a publicly owned open-source software system with mandatory printed ballots. the reason this is important is because this gives you the opportunity to have the largest amount of is on the software that calculates the vote, as well as reaching the best possibility of securing a voter

intend, because that is important, if a voter is confused by the ballot this side, if a voter is confused by the process. necessarily, the voter's intent can be at risk. "we are talking about here is a security issue. two of them. one of them is the security issue associated with no one knowing what the big black box does. the other is understanding of that a broker wants to know that when they voted for one person, that is the vote that is counted them with. thank you for listening. chairperson campos: thank you very much. next speaker, please. >> hello. my name is brad turner. good to see you. today, i wanted to hand in a statement i typed up, giving some background on how we got here, and the basic overall. i think many of you know in the

democratic state platform, with the good help of christine pelosi, we advised open source systems with mandatory paper ballots, similar to what was just described. we want you to know the ranked choice but to an issue is not the main focus of the election reform community, but it has become an issue, because at this point we are still not obtaining better security within the voting systems. that, in our opinion, is the job at hand, to make sure we have better election systems. people like allen becker, royce altman, the fellow that wrote the certification process for the federal government. it is pretty much concluded that the current systems are not

appropriate. the question is where we go from here. this conversation seems to have been in the direction of talking about ballot design issues, and whether it is prudent to have an instant runoff rather than a follow-up runoff. i think those are interesting questions, and some of them are philosophical. my point today is to say i think we are good with the current ballot design. what we really need to do is focus on the election systems. it should be stated that the ranked joyce algorithms and software additions -- they create an extra muddling of the current systems that are already concluded by the review of the secretary of state to be inappropriate. we are a little bit ahead of ourselves, talking about ballot redesign. just to be also noted, the open source systems we advocate can handle ranked joyce voting. -- ranked choice of voting.

we want the security aspects to be highlighted continually. that is why i am here today. i brought a handout that might give you some background. chairperson campos: thank you, mr. turner. next speaker, please. >> i live in know we valley -- noe valley. i have been studying different voting systems for about 5.5 years. as you know, i have brought up issues of score voting and approval voting in the past. one reason i think these systems are really interesting is some inherent properties make them simpler for voters and the department of elections. with approval voting, you are using an ordinary ballot. the only change is to count over votes. you do not discard them. if i want to vote for five candidates, i can do that. it is hard for voters to get confused. it is almost impossible to spoil

your ballot. in experiments including looking at really contentious political elections, it turns out you get about 1/5 as many spoiled ballots. whereas with ranked joyce, ballot spoils have not been a major concern, but it has been seven times as many. one slightly more expressive form of voting is score voting, where you rate cadets on a scale of 0 to 4. on its surface, it looks more complex, but it is simpler. it is ok to give two can it's the same score. with rent ballots, you cannot give two candid it's the same rating. there is a simple additive some. -- sum.

you can do it on a normal machine. also, they have a property of being additive, so you can take precinct sub totals and add them together to get the final result. you do not have to transport all the bells to city hall, if you do not want to. ranked choice voting is unique. you have to essentially count all the ballots, because it is possible for a candidate to win at every single precinct, but when you some the dallas together, somebody else wins. i find one litmus test is if you talk to a voter and describe the system briefly and then ask them to explain it to you -- that is a good indication of the simplicity of the system, if it is intuitive. most people are familiar with yelp ratings. they tend to assume you are adding up the points.

whereas with rent-choice voting, if i talked to the average person and say, "describe the other rhythm," -- algorythm," people think it is weighted. they cannot explain the system. >> good afternoon again. eric burke, san francisco green party and the local group our city. thank you for studying this issue. i do find it a little unfortunate that advocates improve the voting systems like ninth choice and others being presented by members of the public would be at odds with each other on this stuff. i think once we gets done -- once we get done studying it, as we evolve through the way we

study voting systems, we can get better. ranked joyce has been in place in many places, including other countries. it has been shown to be effective. i personally follow every election very carefully, and have never seen anything alarming about ranked choice which made me think the person who was best for that community and who they desired to vote for was not being put in office. it looks to me like it is a system that works but could be improved. i think that is where we need to head with this. to some extent, like what is being proposed by some of the other advocates, if we had a rented choice system in which folks could rank all of their candidates in the election with little bauble dots -- you have seen the chart from steven hill. by the way, if you are not talking to steven hill yet, please do. he is the granddaddy of ranked

joyce in san francisco. this does not have to be complicated. if somebody came up to me and asked what an algorithm was for the voting system, i would not have a good answer either. i understand what an algorithm is. i think we can all work together on this. eventually, 20 years down the line, we can optimize our voting system to be incredible. right now, we have a pretty decent ranked joyce -- ranked choice option. let us improve the system. as we project what is likely to happen in the future, let us look at what will allow us to place more than one choices on

the ballot. that will make a major improvement in our ability to make ranked choice much easier for voters to use, because it would give them a chance to write everything i like, and not just two or three candidates. let us make sure we do not drop the ball in getting rid of the campaign financing problems. let us make sure we solve that. that directly messes with french choice as well. -- with ranked choice as well. chairperson campos: public comment is closed. any other questions for mr. fried? if not, thank you for your work. we look forward to continuing to hear from you and get updates. hopefully, you can get any relevant information from some of the folks who spoke. thank you very much. if we can have this matter

continued to the call of the chair -- a motion by commissioner avalos, seconded by commissioner mar. call item no. 5, please. >> item number 5, goals and objectives for 2012. chairperson campos: ms. miller? >> nancy miller, your interim executive officer. there is a short memo before you to remind you that lafco has the power to conduct special studies. while we tend to get focused on cca and some of the other issues, the point of this is just to remind you that you have the power. if there are issues or other services that you want to direct us to explore, that is really our purpose. this item was put on to the direction of the chair, to remind you this is a power to conduct studies of municipal

services solely by lafco. chairperson campos: to add to that, besides community choice aggregation, in the last year or so, we have looked at the issue of garbage disposal and transportation. we also now are looking at the issue of voting. if there are any other issues that you think this commission could look that, we have the opportunity to do that. that is not something we have to do our decide today. but we wanted to make sure we reminded you of that opportunity. supervisor avalos: thank you. i appreciate the reminder about what lafco can do, in terms of research. i think i might want to look at, not just for today -- i will just broach the suspect -- broach the subject. i am looking at municipal banking in san francisco, and how we might be able to use the power of research and study with

lafco to look into what ways we can enact and support san francisco. the treasurer has talked about doing these grants to local credit unions and local community development financial institutions, about $250,000 to support projects they work on. i think that would be something worth looking at. we can go offline and talk about how to engage that. we have in terms that are also interested in working on that. perhaps we can study the scope of work we can do through lafco. chairperson campos: thank you, commissioner avalos. supervisor mar: i wanted to say i strongly support research in that area as well, looking at municipal banks in other

jurisdictions, statewide and local jurisdictions, and how they have managed to control municipal banking institutions as well. chairperson campos: i want to echo that as well. i think it is a great idea. beginning a preliminary discussion of that topic, also keep in mind that not only do we have the benefit of having lafco staff look into that issue, but, to the extent that there may be a need to have an outside expert that has specific expertise in the area, we also have the ability to retain that, if that is inappropriate step to take. we have that ability. and i trust that we will hear from commissioner avakis ab -- avalos and mr. fried, if we get to that point. unless there is a question from

staff, why don't we open it up to public comment? >> good afternoon one more time, commissioners. san francisco green party and our city. definitely want to step up and time in in strong support of studying what it would take to create a municipal bank a and/or potentially regional bank. lafco is all about regional municipality relationships. it can be a really powerful opportunity for the bay area, in consultation with occupy, to get some great stuff to happen with municipal banking. it is a great idea to put some city funds into credit unions instead of big wall street banks, and community banks. however, those credit unions and banks are still somewhat at the mercy, because of their size and where they invest, to investing in a market that is still doing

the stuff that we would want to try to get our banking away from. yes, credit unions and local banks are great. but a true government-owned municipal bank, to me and to the green party, is definitely crucial. we need to make that happen. i want to time in one more time, since we have another commissioner who has not been here recently. we have got to get -- hopefully, right around the time that clean power sf gets approved in the sfpuc, which will probably be sometime in the fall, we really need to get on city-wide broadband municipal fiber-optic. that also dovetails with the smart grid we are going to need for community choice aggregation for clean power sf. i want to say that one more time to make sure that is in the queue for the end of the year. chairperson campos: thank you. is there any other member of the

public would like to speak on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed. colleagues, if we can continue this item to the call of the chair, we will bring this item back as the need may arise. we have a motion by commissioner avalos, seconded by commissioner pimintel. >> item 6, executive officer's report. >> form 700's are done -- are due, and we will be in contact to make sure those are on file. chairperson campos: any member of the public who would like to comment? seeing none, public comment is closed. >> item 7, public comment. chairperson campos: this is an opportunity for any member of the public to speak on any item within the jurisdiction of the

local agency formation commission that is not otherwise on the agenda. seeing none, a public comment is closed. >> item 8, future agenda items. chairperson campos: colleagues, do we have any other future agenda items? i know we have covered some new subject areas for us to focus. is there a member of the public would like to speak? seeing none, public comment is closed. call the last item. >> item number 9, adjournment. chairperson campos: meeting adjourned. thank you very much.

>> i have 2 job titles. i'm manager of the tour program as well as i am the historyian of city hall. this building is multifaceted to

say the very least it's a municipal building that operates the city and county of san francisco. this building was a dream that became a reality of a man by the name of james junior elected mayor of san francisco in 1912. he didn't have a city hall because it was destroyed in the earth wake of 1906. construction began in april of 1913. in december 1915, the building was complete. it opened it's doors in january 1916. >> it's a wonderful experience to come to a building built like this. the building is built as a palace. not for a king or queen.

it's built for all people. this building is beautiful art. those are architecture at the time when city hall was built, san francisco had an enormous french population. therefore building a palace in the art tradition is not unusual. >> jimmie was an incredible individual he knew that san francisco had to regain it's place in the world. he decided to have the tallest dome built in the united states. it's now stands 307 feet 6 inches from the ground 40 feet taller than the united states capital. >> you could spend days going

around the building and finding something new. the embellishment, the carvings, it represents commerce, navigation, all of the things that san francisco is famous for. >> the wood you see in the board of supervisor's chambers is oak and all hand carved on site. interesting thing about the oak is there isn't anymore in the entire world. the floors in china was cleard and never replanted. if you look up at the seceiling you would believe that's hand fs