As the former San Francisco Elections Commission president, I shared the same jaw-dropping reaction as the general public when I heard the current Elections Commission chose not to renew the contract of Elections Director John Arntz: a highly esteemed, competent public servant who has led the department and San Francisco elections with distinction for over 20 years.
The Department of Elections is tasked with running free, fair and functional elections in San Francisco. Elections have strict deadlines for filing and administering every step. It is a marathon task: while Election Day is just one day, the department must run voting centers, set up ballot drop boxes, send mail-in ballots and train thousands of poll workers prior to every Election Day — only to be followed by the counting of the ballots. In my five years of service on the Elections Commission, Arntz was present every step of the way; his exemplary leadership restored voter confidence in a once shaky department and transformed the Department of Elections into one of the best run departments in The City.
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Elections are the bedrock of our democracy, and voter confidence in the fairness of elections is under attack across the country. San Francisco has escaped unscathed, partly because of the proficiency and management of our elections under Arntz’s watch.
When I joined the commission, I was strongly encouraged to work as a poll worker to understand how our elections are run. Many of my former commissioners did the same. We understood firsthand the enormous effort involved in running a safe and proper election.
In 2020, as president of the commission, I was also employed by the San Francisco Unified School District. I was not in the position to influence the politics, recall efforts or the chaos I experienced daily at my workplace — but on the commission, I had confidence that working in tandem with Arntz, we could successfully run two high-turnout elections in the midst of a global pandemic. While the commission’s style of leadership did not always align with the department, as president and director, we always came to agreement and had implicit trust in each other to earn the trust of the public that our elections would be fair, free and functional.
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I left the commission after my term ended in 2022, and I have witnessed firsthand the dismantling of the nonpartisan and professional management of the Elections Commission. First, members called a meeting to potentially remove their own appointees to the Redistricting Task Force based on unfounded allegations made by third parties (who later apologized). Now, they choose to abuse their authority by terminating an eminently qualified and high-performing public servant without basis. The caliber of Arntz’s performance is unquestionable. In 2022 alone, Arntz led the department as it ran its fifth election of the year. All 12 of his direct reports wrote a letter to the commission pleading to keep him.
Yet, in a strange way of thanking him, Commissioner Cynthia Dai acknowledged the reason they had to let him go was so they could “take action on The City’s racial equity plan.” This not only makes a mockery of real equity efforts that require real partnership and strong leadership to accomplish, but also reveals how little the current commissioners appreciate the Herculean efforts of Arntz and his department. I wonder how many of the current commissioners have worked as poll workers, visited a voting center, experienced the poll worker training center or visited the staff on Election Day. If they walked alongside Arntz through an election instead of pushing their own agenda, it would be hard to question his contributions.
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Unlike much of the country, the voters in San Francisco trust the Elections Department. What the current Commission has done calls into question the integrity of elections and election workers, and erodes the trust and credibility that the director and past commissioners carefully built. Even if the commission retracted its vote, they have breached the trust between the current commission and the director is gone. To rebuild that trust, the current Elections Commission president must resign.
San Francisco is able to be a progressive city because we value and uphold democracy. If we shake the foundation of our democracy, it will be tough for the public to trust them to do the tougher work like racial equity and open-source voting.
Viva Mogi is the former two-term president of the Elections Commission and served from 2017-2022. She was formerly the
national field director and is currently
a trainer forAPIAVote, a national APIA voter education organization.
