Chinatown Activists Cut Corners Delivering Vote for San Francisco Mayor Lee

Grassroots organizations in Chinatown are working hard to get the vote out for interim Mayor Ed Lee—work that includes filling out ballots for voters, collecting vote-by-mail ballots and submitting them for voters, and having staff that split time with Ed Lee’s official campaign organization.

Ed Lee's official campaign office on Clay Street. Several Community Tenant Association workers make themselves at home in this building during the week, and one of the formal staffers is a graduate and worker with the Chinatown Community Development Center. Ariel Tian/The Epoch Times

SAN FRANCISCO—Grassroots organizations in Chinatown are working hard to get the vote out for interim Mayor Ed Lee—work that includes filling out ballots for voters, collecting vote-by-mail ballots and submitting them for voters, and having staff that split time with Ed Lee’s official campaign organization.

The two organizations that have played the biggest role in marshaling the vote for Lee in Chinatown are the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), which receives millions of dollars each year in city funds, and the Community Tenant Association (CTA), which has 1,000 activists embedded in neighborhoods throughout the city, and especially in Chinatown. CCDC says it works “extensively” with CTA on issues such as tenants’ rights.

‘Helping’ Voters

On Oct. 23 Epoch Times reporters were given a demonstration of how CTA supports Ed Lee’s campaign.

Outside the Gordon J. Lau elementary school on Clay Street, two Epoch Times reporters presented themselves as prospective voters and asked how they could vote for Ed Lee. A friendly woman quickly appeared to help out. She produced a list of names and phone numbers that had been printed from a computer, and, pointing to the title, explained that she was a CTA activist.

She called someone to come to open the official Ed Lee campaign office, which was across the road.

In the five minute discussion that followed, as Lee campaign office workers arrived, she blithely explained her door-to-door activism as part of her CTA “work unit” on behalf of the Lee campaign.

“If people can’t move, we help them vote,” she said. When asked to clarify, she explained that “helping” might mean to simply have an elderly or disabled person sign and date their ballot, and then she or her people would take it away to fill it out and mail it in. She was asked the same question three times in different ways, and each time affirmed that that is indeed what she meant.

After the Lee campaign workers arrived, she settled into a chair in the office and began chatting with others present. The woman who opened the door to the Lee campaign office was an activist from the CCDC.