Five years after San Francisco allowed noncitizens to vote for school boards, some are helping lead a recall campaign against members who pushed radical agendas.
San Francisco Unified School District made national headlines last year for attempting to rename schools dedicated to presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington during yearlong campus lockouts that infuriated parents. But the board’s agenda did not stop there: It upended merit-based admission standards to one of the nation’s top public high schools and replaced it with a lottery system favoring black and Latino students in a city where the largest minority population is Asian.
That effort, combined with attempting to paint over a Depression-era George Washington mural, was too much to bear for some parents.
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“There was this groundswell of anger in the community about closed schools,” recall organizer Autumn Looijen told one media outlet. “We thought, well, a recall might not succeed. But it’ll give us something positive to do with all that anger, so that it gets channeled into something that might make a difference for our kids.”
Siva Raj, a technology entrepreneur who emigrated from India and is an organizer along with Looijen, is one of 74 noncitizens who filed to participate in the recall election, according to KQED.
Over in Chinatown, Chinese green card holder Angela Zhou relentlessly worked to get new voters registered for the recall. “I will be voting for the first time … I want to exercise my rights here,” she told the San Francisco Standard. “I feel angry.”
In recent years, Democrats have pushed to allow noncitizens to vote, and their efforts have paid off in San Francisco and New York City. San Francisco has a 34% immigrant population, and this class has been the most vocal supporters of the recall.
“It’s ironic that Democrats enact these voting laws under the guise of protecting the rights of noncitizens who are mostly minorities,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, “but they really don’t care about that class. It’s all about political power.”
Judicial Watch has been on a mission to combat voter fraud and, in 2019, it settled a lawsuit that requires California and Los Angeles County to clean up voter rolls with 1.5 million invalid voter names.
“If some of their own get taken out politically, it’s the price they are willing to pay as long as they are able to disrupt the system,” Fitton added.
State Assemblymember Kevin Kiley, who ran against Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recent recall election, said the school board crossed the line with the Left when it “deemed Abraham Lincoln insufficiently woke” and wanted to cancel him.
“It just shows you how rotten this school board is, even in the most liberal city in the country you have a recall against the members supported by the state senator from that area,” Kiley told the Washington Examiner. “It’s beyond parody. San Francisco is a preview of what is to come in California, and California is a preview of across the country. 2022 is a very important year turning the page on failed policies in California before they spread to rest of the country.”
One of the leading opponents of the recall is the group Berniecrats, formed in 2016 to support Bernie Sanders’s presidential run. Berniecrats has labeled the recall as “asinine” and right-wing.
“When billionaires & their cronies dump $1 MILLION into right-wing recalls attacking SF public schools, we fight back! Our school board is not for sale!” Berniecrats tweeted.
Join @sfberniecrats for a #NoSchoolBoardRecalls lit drop this Saturday at 11 am. When billionaires & their cronies dump $1 MILLION into right-wing recalls attacking SF public schools, we fight back! Our school board is not for sale! Sign up here:
https://t.co/XFcvSGygI0— SF Berniecrats ? (@sfberniecrats) January 14, 2022
However, recall organizers Looijen and Raj told the Washington Post that they are liberals who celebrated President Joe Biden’s win and opposed the Newsom recall. They created such a large groundswell of support that Mayor London Breed backed the movement even though she appointed one of the targets to a seat. The remaining members would have been included in the recall, but they have not been on the board long enough per city regulations, the activists said.
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“It’s richly ironic that this is happening,” said Zack Smith, a legal fellow at Heritage Foundation. “To allow noncitizens to vote is a bad idea regardless. But it highlights how troubling these woke policies really are. The fact that it’s being used with unintended consequences against the Left doesn’t mitigate that it’s a bad idea.”
