How We Discovered the City's Vote Tampering

The City outsourced the vote tally to Francisco & Associates. Citizen activist David E. Mix obtained the vote cast by each parcel owner from the firm, which sent him this CD:

We read the file city_submit_vote_0809.dbf. Specifically, we deleted 391 bytes of header information; broke the data into lines of 32 bytes; imported the data to an Excel spreadsheet; and sorted the file by Francisco's column header VOTE_AMT.

The result: There were 11,736 parcels with a vote amount of 66.72, the proposed assessment increase for single family residences in benefit zone one, and 9,805 parcels with vote amount 72.50, the proposed increased for single family residences in benefit zone two. This totals 21,541 parcels with 1,493,887.42 votes, essentially matching the single family residence vote of 1,497,931.00 published by the City Clerk; a few miscellaneous parcels account for the minor difference.

While the conclusion is well established, our review was not exhaustive, and additional irregularities remain to be examined.

There you have it. Single family homeowner votes were weighted by the proposed increase in their LLAD tax. Meanwhile, the Port got to cast 1,405,336.06 votes, its total proposed LLAD tax.