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A Slap on Campaign Conduct

By Ethen Lieser

We’ve all been targeted with phone calls telling us to vote for this person or that person. Some may even contain slanted truths about a particular political figure. But most of the time, the people or organizations who made this message don’t identify themselves.

"Current law allows these phone calls to enter households without identifying who paid for these messages,” said Wade Crowfoot, the legislative aide to Supervisor Aaron Peskin.

During San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors meeting on Aug. 13, Supervisor Peskin put hammer to wood on this issue. The proposed resolution passed easily on its first reading and will be brought up again next Monday. If it passes then, which it most likely will, the resolution will become law in 30 days.

The resolution stated that whoever sends these political messages must divulge their identify at the end of the recording.

"The current law never anticipated this type of campaigning,” Crowfoot said. “Nobody ever contemplated that you actually had the technology to record a simple phone message and get it into 20,000 homes.”

Crowfoot also said Supervisor Peskin has dealt first-hand with this problem. When Peskin ran in the District 3 elections in November of 2000, many residents received automatic messages that called him an “anti-renter.” Many of the recipients of the messages were renters at the time, Crowfoot said.

"The phone messages were misleading and made some claims that were baseless,” Crowfoot said. “They were really baiting people, but nobody knew who sent the messages.”

Also, supervisor Matt Gonzalez revealed a plan to establish another Juvenile Justice Monitoring Committee consisting of a three-person taskforce, much to the dismay of Supervisor Sophie Maxwell.

Maxwell aide Sarah He, stated that there are already four existing youth commission committees, making it useless to add another. The main duties of the commission would be to make recommendations to the board on possible legislative and budgetary actions relating to the juvenile justice system.

"Within those four commissions, Supervisor Maxwell thinks they can find a way to help or assist in looking over this budget,” He said. "But to set up another committee or commission, it just seems like a waste of resources because we’re not looking at our existing ones that we already have. She feels that she can utilize what’s already available.”

Supervisor Maxwell was also adamant about passing a resolution that planned to execute a Youth Recognition Day, to occur in the fall of each year. In the resolution, the clerk of the Board of Supervisors would work closely with the Youth Commission and interested members of the Board.

Reach Ethen Lieser at elieser@asianweek.com.