GREEN CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE ARRESTED AT SIT-IN AT SF DEPARTMENT OF ELECTIONS

San Francisco – (A12, 6:26 p.m.) Four people – including a Green Party
congressional candidate – were arrested after a dramatic sit-in at the
Elections Office at City Hall late yesterday afternoon.

All are being cited and released, according to authorities, who would not
disclose the charges. About two dozen demonstrators entered the Elections Office at about 4:30 p.m. Monday to protest voting irregularities during the March vote.

Terry Baum, a write-in candidate for Congress (8th District) on the Green
Party ballot in March, was among those being arrested. Others include
voters who said their votes were not counted in March.

Baum had apparently won her party's nomination in March – but then lost it when the city refused to count hundreds of votes.

City elections officials, a week after the Primary, told Baum she had won
the Green Party nomination with 1,659 valid write-in votes, 54 more than
necessary – the first third party write-in to win a state nomination in 36
years. But, a week later, the city invalidated hundreds of ballots,
claiming voters, despite hand-writing in Baum's name, had failed to fill in
an "arrow" on the ballot correctly, thus technically violating an obscure
state code.

"We refuse to allow San Francisco to become another Florida. If
disenfranchised voters in Florida in 2000 had been willing to go to jail to
preserve their voting rights, we might not be facing the horrible mess in
Iraq that we read about every day with such pain, and sense of doom," said Baum earlier Monday.