PUBLIC DEFENDER CHESA BOUDIN WINS SAN FRANCISCO DA RACE IN MAJOR VICTORY PROGRESSIVE PROSECUTOR MOVEMENT

Son of incarcerated parents, backed by Black Lives Matter co-founders, Boudin will be the next DA of San Francisco.

In a win for the progressive prosecutor movement, deputy public defender Chesa Boudin has declared victory over Interim District Attorney Suzy Loftus in the San Francisco race for DA. Boudin announced he’d won the race late Saturday afternoon following a concession from Loftus, Boudin’s campaign told The Appeal. The election was held on Tuesday, November 5, but it took several days to tabulate the votes. As with most local races in the city, voters can select their first-, second-, and third-place choices in a process called ranked-choice voting.

In the last weeks of the election, Loftus and Boudin led the four-candidate pack, which also included Alameda County prosecutor Nancy Tung and Leif Dautch, a deputy attorney general for California. In October, Mayor London Breed, who endorsed Loftus, appointed her to serve as interim DA after George Gascón resigned, affording her, what critics said, was an unfair boost. In addition to Breed, the San Francisco Chronicle, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Senator Dianne Feinstein also endorsed Loftus.

Boudin earned national headlines, as well as high-profile endorsements. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Black Lives Matter co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza all announced their support for Boudin.

During the campaign, Boudin said he planned to continue the work he did as a deputy public defender to eliminate money bail, and expand alternative to incarceration programs, including for first-time DUI offenses.

Boudin also pledged to implement restorative justice practices, which, he said, helped him cope with the trauma of growing up with incarcerated parents, Weather Underground activists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. His parents were convicted for their participation in a robbery in which three people were killed. “I went through a lot of these kinds of challenges that many children with incarcerated parents go through: feelings of guilt and abandonment and anger,” Boudin told The Appeal in January.

During the campaign, Loftus also promised to end cash bail and pledged to prioritize decarceration through alternative to incarceration programs that, as her website states, “address the root causes of crime.” But as interim DA, Loftus has ended a diversion program for those charged with a first-time DUI offense.

“Traffic safety is so important for all of us, particularly given that so many of us have lost a loved one due to someone driving under the influence,” Loftus said in a statement last month. “These deaths are preventable, and prevention starts with people knowing there is accountability when it comes to drinking and driving.”

Boudin criticized Loftus’s decision, calling it an “ominous sign.”

“It was clear that she was never a reform candidate and her campaign promises are being violated before she has even won the election,” Boudin texted The Appeal on Tuesday.

Much of Loftus’s career has been spent in law enforcement. She was president of the San Francisco Police Commission from 2012 to 2016 and worked under Senator Kamala Harris, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, in both the DA and attorney general’s offices. (Harris tweeted her support on Election Day.) Before serving as interim DA, Loftus was assistant chief legal counsel for Sheriff Vicki Hennessy.

Local law enforcement spent more than $650,000 campaigning against Boudin. “Chesa Boudin: The #1 Choice of Criminals and Gang Members!” read one mailer sent by the San Francisco Police Officers Association. “Say No to Chesa Boudin.” The association also donated $3,500 to a pro-Loftus political action committee.

Former police chief Greg Suhr, whom then-Mayor Ed Lee asked to resign in 2016 after several police shootings and mass demonstrations, also supported Loftus. While Loftus was head of the police commission, there were 15 fatal police shootings, according to SFPD data; 10 involved people.

Top Photo-San Francisco District Attorney elect Chesa Boudin and family

https://theappeal.org/public-defender-chesa-boudin-wins-san-francisco-da-race-in-major-victory-progressive-prosecutor-movement/

San Francisco Examiner 4:00PM  11.9.2019

San Francisco District Attorney hopeful Chesa Boudin continued to lead in ranked-choice voting on Saturday, surpassing interim District Attorney Suzy Loftus by more than 2,400 votes.

The latest results from Tuesday’s election showed progressive challenger Boudin leading with 85,950 votes to Loftus’ 83,511 votes.

While Loftus was initially ahead in the neck-and-neck race, Boudin began to close in on her lead Thursday, reducing it from 2,205 votes to 879 votes. On Friday, the race flipped after Boudin surpassed Loftus by 156 votes.

Boudin is now ahead by 2,439 votes.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/chesa-boudins-lead-increases-over-suzy-loftus-in-da-contest/

The community newsletter Mission Local keeps close tabs on goings on at City Hall. Following is its report and analysis on the status of the District Attorney and legislative seat race.

Political Science professor Jason McDaniel state emphatically, “It’s very clear to me Boudin will be the winner of the DA’s race” based on his analysis of the vote count to date.

Stay tuned.

Mission Local – By Joe Eskenazi  11.8.2019

With provisional ballots making up the vast majority of outstanding votes, challengers Boudin and Preston are in the catbird seat

Provisional voters tend to lean left — way left. “They vote like hippies,” one longtime city political operative told me. 

If so, the hippies may yet carry DA hopeful Chesa Boudin and District 5 challenger Dean Preston to victory. It was a very good Friday for them. Boudin erased an 879-vote hole and is now atop interim DA Suzy Loftus by 156 votes.

A purported construction mishap Friday knocked out running water at City Hall. Anyone only aware of San Francisco’s condition via misery safari/needles-and-feces articles regarding our filthy streets would not have been surprised with the woeful state of the restrooms today at our seat of government.

One thing that wasn’t backed up, however, was ballots. Department of Election workers crossed their legs and diligently flushed through some 26,761 of them, leaving 1,500 mail ballots and 14,000-odd provisional ballots to begin working through on Saturday.

Yes, 156 votes: 78,809 to 78,653. Boudin has 50.05 percent of the vote to Loftus’ 49.95.

The moderate candidates’ inability to adopt a ranked-choice strategy and Boudin’s heavy investment in Chinatown and endorsements from Chinese organizations and newspapers may yet loom large. 

That’s close. But District 5 is even closer. Preston, who led by 35 votes over Supervisor Vallie Brown at the end of yesterday, now leads by — 35 votes. This is a statistical anomaly.

Rarely does a flipped coin land on its side, but, dios mio, it does happen.

These are amazingly close races. But S.F. State political science professor Jason McDaniel said both Boudin and Preston are now in commanding positions with some 1,500 late absentee ballots and 14,000 provisional votes to be tallied. 

“I will be shocked if the provisionals change this now,” said McDaniel. “It’s very clear to me Boudin will be the winner of the DA’s race and it’s most likely that Dean Preston will win the D5 race.” 

A provisional ballot, if you’re wondering, is a ballot given to a voter when there are questions regarding that voter’s eligibility.

And, again, if you’re wondering, 86 percent of them have been deemed valid over the past four San Francisco mayoral elections, per John Arntz, the city’s election director.

Boudin  continued to rack up first-place votes at a greater clip than Loftus. She is getting more of the transfer votes from third- and fourth-place finishers Nancy Tung and Leif Dautch — but not enough, and not as many as she had in past batches.

Loftus received only 26% of first place votes from today’s batch of votes, compared to 34% on Nov 6, and 30% on Nov 7. Boudin received 33% of first choice votes today. Loftus not able to overcome that through the RCV tally today, receiving 36% of Tung transfers. pic.twitter.com/paY2x64rq5

— Jason McDaniel (@ValisJason) November 9, 2019

The water has come back at City Hall. But the counting never stopped. The next update will come at 4 p.m. on Saturday.

https://missionlocal.org/2019/11/s-f-election-update-a-watershed-moment-for-chesa-boudin-and-dean-preston/

He rhetorically invokes originalist jurisprudence but follows it quite inconsistently — and rarely with regard to race discrimination, the issue that concerns him most. He officiated at the third marriage of Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host and racial provocateur. But Thomas also understands himself to be a black justice, and he sometimes inserts references to black history and anti-black racism into his opinions.

Thomas is, in short, a bundle of contradictions, which Corey Robin proposes to sort out in his important and well-argued book, “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.” Thomas’s racial dilemma, he argues, is a microcosm of America’s.

Robin, a political scientist, asserts that a consistent strain of black nationalism unites Thomas’s politics and jurisprudence from his early adulthood through his decades as a justice — a general point that, Robin concedes, has been made by other scholars. What makes his account distinctive is his claim that three central frameworks organize Thomas’s thought: race, capitalism and the Constitution.

 

On race, Robin shows how the black nationalism of the early 1970s, with its skepticism of the civil rights movement’s successes and its emphasis on black self-help, fed into Thomas’s embrace of conservatism. But Thomas, as usual, went further. Thomas, according to Robin, believes that “whites — southern and northern, liberal and conservative, rural and urban — are racists” and have always been. Thus, in one opinion Thomas took a swipe at campaign finance laws by noting that the Tillman Act of 1907, which regulated corporate contributions, was named for the white-supremacist Sen. Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina. Such regulations, he seems to think, have their roots in racism — although exactly how remains unclear. Thomas’s jurisprudential opposition to affirmative action, Robin concludes, is based on his belief that the practice is a continuation of historical white supremacy — a system that requires blacks to ask for the patronage of white people.

 

Thomas also embraced black capitalism, Robin argues, but it is a black enterprise with little protection under law. Aided by the writings of the conservative black economist Thomas Sowell, Thomas came to believe that blacks should eschew civil rights and politics and instead pursue the kind of work that Thomas’s self-employed, middle-class grandfather used to do. In a 1994 voting rights case, Holder v. Hall, and in later opinions, Thomas rejects the notion that blacks can achieve any kind of collective political agency through voting rights, Robin asserts. In economic matters, Thomas embraces what Robin calls a futilitarian argument — that white supremacy is so entrenched, it is not worthwhile fighting it through law — as he seems to do in a 2015 dissent rejecting “disparate impact,” a theory that even facially neutral state policies may discriminate based on race. Even his grandfather’s patient support of the NAACP, it would seem, was a fool’s errand.

Ultimately, Thomas believes in what Robin calls the White Constitution — an American Constitution so tainted by its historical origins in slavery that its main use has been (and continues to be) to oppress African Americans. He also, according to Robin, believes in a Black Constitution — a spare set of constitutional rights claimed by self-sufficient, patriarchal black men during Jim Crow, such as the Second Amendment right to bear arms, which Thomas described at length in a 2010 case involving a Chicago handgun ban. Thomas seems to argue that even these rights are few in number and offer little legal protection for blacks, for expansive rights guarantees would only sap the manhood of black America. He almost seems to pine for the lost world of lynching and Jim Crow.

 

Robin argues that Thomas inhabits a bleak world of entrenched white supremacy that might seem unrecognizable to many — with the exception of many writers and advocates on the left who, Robin argues, largely share it. Robin asserts that the progressive left parts company with Thomas only in that it seeks legal remedies for discrimination and inequality. He closes on a somber note: “We may ask whether we, in the shadow of defeat, have simply come to accept and repeat, without realizing it, the story he has been telling us for decades.”

 

Robin has produced a thoughtful and careful explication of Thomas’s core ideas, showing how they emerge partly from his biography and setting out their disturbing implications. This is as good a synthesis of Thomas’s intellectual world as we are likely to get.

But Robin’s ambitious project is based on the assumption that a unified philosophy ties together Thomas’s complicated life. Robin acknowledges that on several key issues — affirmative action and disparate impact, for instance — Thomas indicated a flexibility as a young, ambitious Republican officeholder that later hardened into an inflexible pessimism. Moreover, judicial opinion-writing is hardly a transparent vehicle for the explication of a judge’s social philosophy.

After all, Thomas’s racial observations occur in relatively few of his opinions, and on most issues he seems to get to the same general position as his conservative white colleagues, albeit sometimes more extreme. As Robin acknowledges, “In certain cases, where Thomas is trying to reason his way to a conservative outcome, race affords him easy access to that destination.”

Moreover, if Thomas has a philosophy, black nationalism is an odd name for it. Most black nationalists, from 19th-century figures such as the abolitionist Martin Delany to the Black Panthers of the post-civil-rights era, could claim a nation — some set of black institutions through which they sought to practice their nationalist craft. Thomas, by contrast, has articulated his vision largely in white-dominated settings where he is often the only black person in the room. He seems most comfortable in far-right circles where even traditional black conservatives now often feel unwelcome, and among those whom he believes are openly racist and intend to do his people harm — at least if one takes his rhetoric at face value.

Whatever the proper name for it, Thomas’s philosophy is perplexing. Despite Robin’s valuable efforts, Thomas remains, in so many ways, an enigma.

 

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

By Corey Robin

Metropolitan. 301 pp. $30

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-contradictory-conservatism-of-clarence-thomas/2019/09/26/05ad97a4-d325-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html

By:  Lee Heidhues 11.6.2019

Coup d’état.  definition

A sudden decisive exercise of force in politics especially  the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group

San Francisco may now live with a District Attorney who is a favorite of the City’s power elite while the rest of the citizenry which cares about fairness, ethics and democracy have been left in the dirt.

Democracy has failed.

Regardless of who is the District Attorney in San Francisco the alarming fact is that the City power elite thrust its choice on the electorate via a virtual political Coup d’état. 

It is a shameful and alarming event in this allegedly progressive City.

What were the events which led to this government seizure of the District Attorney’s race less than three weeks before the votes were tabulated?  The tawdry story is well known to most San Franciscans. It has escaped notice of the world at large.

San Francisco was to have held its first open District Attorney election in over 100 years.  Yet 18 days before the election the Mayor swore in her hand-picked candidate who was one of four people seeking the seat. This blatant and brazen political move drew the scorn of many people who knew it to be a power play.  Nothing more.  The Mayor herself said she wanted a DA, “I can trust.”

The ”Interim” DA was then anointed with the mantle of incumbent and all the favorable press coverage which goes with a newly minted public official.

Next, and even more insidious, was the intervention of the notoriously right-wing Police Officers Association.  The POA set up a Political Action Committee (PAC), spent upwards of a Million dollars and blanketed City mailboxes and television viewers with outright libelous, defamatory, inciteful and shameless ads.  This abuse of free speech was directed towards one candidate, Chesa Boudin.

Boudin was the only one of four candidates who vowed to hold the SFPD accountable for its misconduct, a state of affairs which is well known throughout San Francisco.  This conduct includes the killings of unarmed civilians, racist behavior and a pattern of abuse towards many San Franciscans, particularly those of minority background.

It is a sad day for San Francisco.

UPDATE:  11PM.  ALL THE VOTES ARE COUNTED AND CHESA BOUDIN IS AHEAD BY 33% TO 31% OVER THE “INTERIM” DA SUZY LOFTUS.  CHESA LEADS BY OVER 2000 VOTES. NOW WE ENTER THE RANKED CHOICE COUNT OF VOTES.

With Ranked Choice voting there’s a long way to go before the votes are finally tabulated and  a winner announced.  

At this point Chesa Boudin is in the lead and could be the next San Francisco District Attorney. Should Chesa  win all the money spent by the Police Officers Association in its demagogic attempt to destroy Chesa and the Mayor’s appointment of an “Interim” DA 18 days before the election will have failed miserably.  As well it should.

Photo above. Chesa Boudin arriving at Election night party

San Francisco Chronicle 11.5.2019 Election Night in San Francisco

Chesa Boudin, an attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office, collected 31.8% of votes in early election returns, narrowly leading interim District Attorney Suzy Loftus’ 31.1% in Tuesday’s race to become San Francisco’s top prosecutor.

The two candidates offered contrasting visions for the city’s criminal justice system, with Boudin amassing a groundswell of support, both locally and nationally, for his plan to make progressive reforms favoring rehabilitation over incarceration.

Sick and twisted racism.  This is Trump’s America in 2019. Such conduct is beyond reprehensible.

America is reaping the whirlwind for permitting such a Racist buffoon to sit in the White House.  All the racist crazies have been cut loose to live out their perverse fantasties of a white supremacist social order.

Washington Post 11.4.2019

Last month Berlin instituted a five year rent freeze on many rental properties.

Berlin is just one City. It is a trendsetter and actions taken in the German capital have worldwide reprecussions.

Deutsche Welle 11.3.2019

Berlin’s brand-new rent freeze (and cap) is hardly unique among cities with pressured housing markets. But while other cities have stricter laws, Berlin’s new rent control has some more unique protections.

Around 1.5 million homes in Berlin will have their rents frozen for five years and capped at €9.80 ($10.90) per square meter, after the Berlin state government agreed a new rent control law on October 23.

The new measures were described as a “breathing space for tenants” by Housing Minister Katrin Lompscher on Tuesday.

The idea that a city with an acute housing shortage should introduce rent control is not exactly revolutionary, said Barbara Steenbergen, head of the EU liaison office at the International Union of Tenants (IUT).

“It’s nothing extremely special,” she told DW. “Actually I was more or less waiting for something to happen in Berlin.”

Berlin’s rent prices have been exploding, and as the city’s population grows by some 40,000 people a year, displacement of low-income communities and social inequality have been the inevitable result.

Last year, a Global Residential Cities Index published by property consultants Knight Frank found that Berlin’s rents were rising faster than anywhere else in the world: from 2017 to 2018 alone, rents rose by 21%, it said.

The law also says that landlords cannot charge rents higher than what the previous tenant paid, and, should their rent be above the limit set out in a “rent table,” tenants can even sue to have their rent lowered. These two measures are unique globally, according to international tenants’ organization, which says they represent the strongest part of Berlin’s law.

It was good news for Oleg Mirzac, one of the final holdouts in an apartment building in the north of Berlin, where new owners want to renovate and raise rents by as much as 140%.

He has lived there since 2003, when Berlin’s rents were less than half of what they are now, and when hardly anyone spent more than a quarter of their income on rent. He’s seen almost all his neighbors leave in the last few years as new owners have pressured them out to make way for expensive renovations.

Like many others in Berlin, Mirzac started a community tenants’ initiative, the Pankow Tenants Forum, to fight the price-out attempt in his building. He welcomes the new Berlin measures. “The rents have been rising nonstop for 10 years, and the incomes aren’t rising at all,” he told DW. “I think I speak for a lot of Berlin’s tenants when I say I welcome this, and hope it creates a barrier for property speculators.”

A freeze, and a cap 

The new law was passed by the Berlin state cabinet in late October after 12 hours of last-minute negotiations ironed out the final differences among the three government parties: the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the socialist Left party and the Greens. It is expected to come into effect in January 2020.

The new freeze is not total. To encourage new construction, buildings built after 2014 will be exempt, as will government-owned social housing, where rents are controlled anyway, but an estimated three-quarters of apartments in Berlin will be covered. From 2022, landlords will be allowed to raise rents in line with inflation of 1.3% per year.

But despite warnings of a return to socialism from the political opposition, the regulations do little more than bring Berlin into line with legal situations already in place in other major cities that suffer chronic housing shortages and ballooning rents, including San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Vienna, Madrid, Barcelona and Amsterdam.

Countless protests against soaring housing prices have sprung up in recent years in Germany

Read more: Berlin renters fight to save their homes from new buyers

In the last few years, Spain and the Netherlands have introduced nationwide rent control measures, as have four states in the US: California, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. Canada has had some form of rent regulation since 2006, while Paris, France, is already planning regulation, presumably waiting to see how Berlin’s legislation works out.

“There is a common understanding that it is necessary to regulate housing markets, because housing markets do not work by themselves,” Steenbergen added. “If you don’t regulate, there is always a shortage of cheap rental housing, while there is always enough expensive housing and property to buy, because that is where investors can make profits.”

Steenbergen says Berlin’s controls compare well with others, though they don’t go much further: In New York, San Francisco, the Netherlands and Spain, rents are also capped to inflation rates. In Spain, there is also a five-year minimum on rent contracts to protect against rent hikes.

Berlin now also has measures to control what she calls “ren-eviction”: that is, forcing poor tenants out by renovating the building to justify a massive rent hike – exactly what its happening to Oleg Mirzac in Pankow.

Under the new law, rents in Berlin’s renovated buildings can only go up by €1 per square meter. However, rules in the Netherlands are even stricter: 70% of a building’s tenants have to give their consent before any renovation can happen.

Pressure from new owners to force out their tenants can often be indirect. Mirzac says it started with cease-and-desist notices over bikes in the courtyard or shoes in the hallways, and moved up to court cases. He also says that construction workers broke his heating when other apartments were being modernized. “They walled up a fireplace I had that was necessary for ventilation,” he said.

The new Berlin law also follows the Netherlands and Spain in that it gives “extortionate rents” a legal definition, setting it at 120% of the value set out in the rent table.

If the rent is above that, Berlin tenants can sue to have their rent lowered, regardless of what it says in their contracts. They can even have their rent returned, which Steenbergen says is unique.

“This is really interesting,” she said. “This is something we should follow very closely. I think it’s going to be very hard to realize that.”

Read more: No place to live: Germany’s daunting urban housing market

But the freeze has faced predictable criticism from some quarters: Associations of property developers, architects and construction companies wrote a joint open letter to the Berlin government predicting that the rent cap would see investment in property in the capital drop by 90% and would even endanger the construction industry.

https://www.dw.com/en/berlins-new-rent-freeze-how-it-compares-globally/a-50937652

Matt Gonzalez is one of the most respected public officials in San Francisco. He is Chief Trial Attorney in the Public Defenders office, a former President of the Board of Supervisors and Mayoral candidate who nearly defeated Gavin Newsom in 2003.

Matt is smart, articulate, street wise and has worked with Chesa Boudin for years.

Matt’s endorsement is thorough, detailed and debunks every bogus argument put forth by Chesa’s opponents. Specifically, Matt calls out the vicious and lie filled campaign now blanketing the airwaves and mailboxes in San Francisco.

Following the untimely death of Jeff Adachi last February, a vocal segment of San Franciscans urged that Matt Gonzalez be appointed Public Defender by the Mayor. He did not receive the appointment.

Anyone who really cares about who is elected District Attorney Tuesday and has any doubts about Chesa should read Matt’s words.

November 2, 2019

The link follows.

https://themattgonzalezreader.com/2019/11/02/chesa-boudin-for-district-attorney/

Who’s Afraid of Chesa Boudin?

The reactionary San Francisco Police Officers Association (POA) has mounted several T.V. and mail attacks that misrepresent what Boudin believes in. It’s their hope that voters will be frightened of a candidate who has pledged to hold police accountable and who has committed himself to implementing restorative justice and alternatives to incarceration. It remains to be seen whether anyone cares what the POA thinks, given that in the last San Francisco mayor’s race, their endorsed candidate finished with just 7% of the vote. Despite their unpopularity their PAC (and associated law enforcement PACs) have thus far spent an estimated $700,000 in this race, which is more than Boudin has raised, to try deterring voters from considering his candidacy.

“Interim” DA Suzy Loftus and ex Chief Greg Suhr. He endorsed Suzy.

Why is the POA so invested in this election?

When considering the arguments the POA makes against Boudin, keep in mind that the POA doesn’t have the greatest track record for engaging in lawful activity and protecting San Franciscans. They vigorously defended their members who sent racist text messages on personal phones while on duty. These texts included use of the word “n — ,” as well as disparaging comments about LGBTQ persons. The POA also defended police officers who were ultimately convicted in federal court and sentenced to prison for writing false police reports and entering homes without warrants or consent in the Henry Hotel scandal. Could it be that the POA is afraid of Chesa Boudin because they know he will hold them accountable for their actions?

The outrageous appointment of Suzy Loftus to the DA job 18 days before the November 5 vote has stirred outrage and controversy.

The last minute foisting of an “Interim” DA on the electorate is shocking in its brazenness even in jaded, cloistered San Francisco.

The “Interim” DA has used the past two weeks to stage a number of photo ops,  put forth proposals whose sole purpose is free publicity, and further her campaign assisted by a vicious, slanderous campaign against Chesa Boudin by the Police Officers Assocation PAC.

The Recorder 11.1.2019

Leif Dautch and Chesa Boudin vocalized their frustration with the appointment of candidate Suzy Loftus as interim district attorney in the run-up to the election and formally requested that Mayor Breed install Tuesday’s winner after the results are certified instead of waiting until the start of the new year.

SAN FRANCISCO—In a show of solidarity, two rival district attorney candidates joined forces on the steps of the Hall of Justice on Friday to call on Mayor London Breed to appoint the winner of next week’s election immediately after certification, rather than wait until the start of the new year.

With the hotly contested district attorney race just days away, Leif Dautch and Chesa Boudin vocalized their frustration with the appointment of candidate Suzy Loftus as interim district attorney and formally requested that Breed install the election’s winner after the results are tallied.

Two former judges were on hand lending their support for Boudin and Dautch’s petition. Retired San Francisco Superior Court Judge Tomar Mason and retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Martha Goldin addressed the crowd of about two dozen of the candidates’ supporters, calling for the naming of the winner after the election.

“Both the use of the District Attorney’s Office for electioneering, and the influx of hundreds of thousands of dollars to oppose Chesa Boudin, constitute ethical and moral violations of voters’ rights,” Judge Goldin said.

Dautch said for the first time in 110 years there was not going to be an incumbent name on the ballot for district attorney, until two weeks ago when the mayor decided to put her thumb on the scale and install her preferred candidate. Boudin added, “Since then, we have seen daily press conferences, using district attorney staff resources and making announcements to benefit Loftus’ campaign, rather than purely serve the public good. It’s a disgraceful abuse of power.”