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By last October, with ES&S still trying to sell city officials on touch screens, Arntz, again with the commission's backing, gave the vendor an ultimatum: Either come up with a way of upgrading the Eagles, or the city would put the project out to bid. The vendor reluctantly agreed. But it was the beginning of a fiasco.
Sources familiar with the matter say the vendor suggested that it could do the upgrade for $100,000 if, instead of modifying each of the hundreds of precinct machines, it installed new software for two large-capacity vote-counting computers at City Hall. The plan would have involved physically transferring uncounted ballots from throughout San Francisco to City Hall after the polls closed, something that Arntz -- mindful of past problems -- preferred not to do.
Both sides agreed to sign an upgrade contract by Jan. 1. But with Arntz and the department up to their elbows in conducting an election in the fall, little got done. It wasn't until January that contract talks even began. By then, ES&S had announced it would cost $1.6 million to upgrade all the precinct machines. Yet inexplicably, the negotiations languished.
Michael Mendelson, who was then commission president, spent February through April fending off pleas from IRV supporters to finish dealing with the vendor so the city would have something to submit to the state to be certified. Steven Hill says that for two months he was told by one or another commissioner that the contract "would be ready any day now. They kept saying, 'Next week, next week.' But we've never gotten a straight answer as to what the holdup was."
The department came to terms with ES&S only days before the pivotal July hearing at which the secretary of state's office rejected the city's slapped-together plan to partially count ballots by hand in the event the company couldn't complete the upgrade in time. Even so, the city didn't have a signed contract until August -- well past when the work was to have been finished. ES&S had continued to work on the upgrade without a contract, and its representatives insisted there would be no impediment to putting IRV in place in November using the Optech Eagles.
Still, during the months that contract negotiations slowed to a crawl, work had not progressed sufficiently to meet the secretary of state's guidelines for advance testing. Everybody -- the commission, Arntz, ES&S, and Shelley -- blamed everybody else. But for angry IRV supporters, dozens of whom had vented before the Elections Commission and at Shelley's hearing, it felt like the end of a game in which the team with the upper hand had run out the clock.
From his résumé, it is hard to imagine a more improbable big-city elections chief than John Arntz.
Not only did the Detroit native have no previous experience running elections, he had never even worked in government. He started at the Elections Department in October 1999 as a desk clerk answering phones and greeting the public. Barely 2 1/2 years later, upon Haygood's dismissal, he was running the place.
It wasn't his first unlikely career turn. In 1996, after graduating from the University of South Dakota's law school, Arntz eschewed the bar exam and returned to Alaska (where he had earned a degree in English literature at the University of Alaska) to be a carpenter. "I realized while in law school that becoming a practicing attorney is something I didn't want to do," he says.
In 1998, he moved to the Bay Area, teaching computer classes and freelancing for an online aviation magazine. He left a job writing product descriptions for a vitamin company to join the Elections Department.
By all accounts, Arntz is a quick study. "He's tireless, dedicated, and has the respect of those who work for him," says former colleague Girard Gleason, who drafted Arntz to help him supervise the printing of ballots for the March 2000 election. "There's no task he hasn't performed over there, including lowly precinct work." Neither, say admirers, is he political. In fact, by his own sheepish admission, San Francisco's top elections official has failed to vote in the last five local elections.
On a rainy primary election night in March 2002, Gleason recalls driving to a polling station in the garage of a Pacific Heights home to pick up Arntz, who was poll sitting, after the volunteer who was supposed to bring him back to City Hall failed to show. "There were two [volunteer] workers with him. The first one bailed out before the polls closed. The second one, whom I think came from a soup kitchen, also threatened to bail. So John reaches in his pocket and hands him $20 to get him to stay. That's the kind of guy he is."
But others express amazement at the degree to which the commission has followed its rookie elections chief on IRV, adding to the perception that the rollout's failure is due to more than mere bungling.
"They defer to him as if he were some veteran elections registrar," says Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy. "You've got to remember: He's still learning the ropes and is a probationary employee."
Even Arntz's selection, conducted under the Elections Commission's auspices, appears to have fit a familiar San Francisco pattern. Touted as a national search, the process attracted only nine applicants. Of the five who made the final cut, only Arntz and two others passed a written exam.
Not a single veteran elections official was among the applicants for the job, with its advertised salary of up to $144,000 per year. (A commission source says Arntz earns about $140,000 annually.) "If the aim was to attract an experienced registrar, that's not the way San Francisco went about it," says Contra Costa County voter registrar Stephen Weir, who served on a panel of experts that helped devise questions for the exam. Weir and another experienced California registrar noted that San Francisco personnel officials failed to employ an outside headhunting firm to aggressively target talented prospective applicants. "If you want to bring in someone with a high-caliber track record -- and trust me, they are out there -- you don't wait for them to come to you," says Weir. "You go after them." Instead, he says, the city used its regular civil service testing process, as if it were hiring a low-level employee such as a clerk.
