A month and a day after the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council's May 14 election, the results are finally confirmed. A challenge to the election results was filed with the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) by Cathy Beauregard-Covit and several others. It has now been denied.
The challenge alleged numerous problems with the election, demanded that the election results be overturned, and further demanded that those at fault be banned from participation for a year. The latter demand, lacking any foundation in law, Constitution, or city statute, was included in the challenge in spite of the fact that one of its signers is a licensed attorney.
Beauregard offered nothing by way of proof in the complaint letter and apparently was unconvincing in her dealings with what DONE now refers to as the "Final Decision Maker." In this case, the FDM was the Human Relations Commission, a city department that claims to have judged about 50 neighborhood council election challenges.
Today, HRC staffer Henrietta Williams informed CSPNC that the election results are upheld. She also said that she would be offering her recommendations.
It is of interest that prior to reaching a decision, Williams and the HRC never officially notified the group of people most at risk from the challenge, namely the winning candidates, nor did she hold any sort of public meeting or hearing, nor did she provide the opposing parties with copies of documents sent to her.
Instead, she apparently called people as she felt necessary and returned calls from people who made the effort to call her. Since information about the challenge was only available "through the grape vine," this must have resulted in a skewed collection of information for her to work from.
It all seems a bit medieval. There was no due process in the traditional sense of American justice. No right to confront one's accusers or even to see the evidence was afforded the challenged parties. And then it got even worse. Those who received calls from Williams confirmed pretty much uniformly that her questions were slanted; they appeared to be based on misinformation about facts and procedures. For those being questioned, it became a chore to explain to Williams that her working assumptions were incorrect and that there is ample evidence to contradict her slanted questions. Williams misinterpreted the election rules that she was supposed to be working from.
In the end it didn't matter, but this was only because there were a mere 10 ballots out of the more than 350 cast that could in any way be considered to be in question, and the difference between the 17th place (a winner) and the 18th place (not a winner) was close to ten times that amount.
Sadly, this lack of due process is the norm rather than the exception. Staff members at the HRC as well as the General Manager of DONE confirmed that in all the election challenges that have been heard and dealt with by DONE and the HRC, there has never been a public meeting or hearing held to allow the opposing parties to confront their accusers or even to state their cases.
What is more peculiar is that the officials involved seem to have no concept that there is anything wrong with what they are doing.
Instead, DONE officials excuse their policies by suggesting that most challenges are frivolous. They argue that the Final Decision Makers cannot be expected to do full investigations of frivolous complaints. That this logic is completely circular never seems to occur to them. In their attitude -- best characterized as lazy and contemptuous -- they very well may miss meritorious complaints because the desire is, above all, to do as little as possible, particularly when it means dealing with opposing sides in person. The concept that all complaints need to be evaluated carefully at the beginning, so that the meritorious complaints can be pulled out of the pile and dealt with properly, is a concept that apparently does not exist in these realms of city government.
Under the new election rules that are supposed to go into effect soon, challenges will be handled in a slightly different way. There will be a pool of decision makers nominated by the neighborhood councils themselves, and in response to an election challenge DONE will pick three people at random who will make the decision. Of concern is DONE's apparent ignorance of what constitutes a fair procedure.
Under the new rules, DONE is supposed to instruct the members of the pool in what their responsibilities will be. It is therefore important that DONE figure out what actually is important before they turn untrained people loose to function as judge, jury and executioner.
In light of all the shortcomings in the HRC "investigation," we await Ms Williams' recommendations on how our hard-working volunteers were supposed to have done their jobs better.
