San Francisco Bay Guardian

To create a unique moment in the presence of others that cannot be repeated, duplicated, or fast-forwarded through to the naughty bits? Pop Up Magazine headily explores this notion while blowing good-natured raspberries at media old and new.

Original article

Editor in Chief Douglas McGray elaborated, “we encourage people, as much as possible, to take advantage of live-ness as a medium. And in most cases, if someone is sharing work in progress, the final product is not going to be live. Basically, we ask people what they're excited about. What they'd enjoy sharing with a crowd. This is what leads people to share work in progress. Because, as writers, or filmmakers, or photographers, or whatever, we tend to be excited about what we're working on at the moment.

Steve Hill, who works at the New America Foundation and was one of the architects of IRV in San Francisco, pointed out that direct runoffs have been tried in San Francisco. "That what we used to have," he told me. "And we saw regular attack ads and ...

Electoral reform advocates Rob Arnow and Steven Hill have discovered that Newsom has once again raided the public financing for mayoral candidates fund, but sought to disguise the move by including a $1.9 million contribution to the fund in his published budget, then draining $1.4 million from a fund transfer that wasn’t highlighted. And that doesn’t even count the $5 million “loan” that Newsom last year took from the fund – which he opposed the creation of -- promising he’d pay it back this year. ...

"This would fundamentally change the formula of politics in California," said Steve Hill, director of the Political Reform Program for the New America Foundation. It would, for example, encourage regional thinking -- there would be a delegation elected from the Bay Area, one from the Central Coast, one from the Gold Country, etc. In effect, California would be treated as what it nearly is -- a country -- with broad issues addressed by representatives from what amount to states...

In 2000, San Francisco voters approved a system of public financing of campaigns for the Board of Supervisors, which in 2006 was expanded to the mayoral race. By eliminating the need for candidates to raise large amounts of private money, the program has been extremely successful at helping sever the link between big money and political decisions. But now this flagship program is threatened: Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing to raid several million dollars from the public campaign fund.

These are anxious times for election security and voting equipment. The system is truly broken, starting at the federal level with a lack of national standards, a chaotic testing regimen, untrustworthy vendors, a revolving door between the industry and government regulators, and a decentralized hodgepodge of election administration from coast to coast.