Ballot Fun: "The People of S.F. Make Up One-Third of S.F.'s Population"

James Fang: Not a mathematician. . .or a grammarian.

By Will Harper

At the bottom of San Francisco’s Voter Information Pamphlet is a disclaimer that says the ballot arguments “are printed as submitted. Spelling and grammatical errors have not been corrected.”

That, my friends, is not good news for those of us who wince at every misuse of “your” and “you’re” and generally like our reading material to be properly punctuated, without, gratutious, comma’s (sic), and apostrophe’s (sic).

While I expected to see a lot of bad grammar in the voter pamphlet, I was surprised to see the almost nonsensical submission from BART director James Fang, the president of Asian Week. You figure that, since Fang owns a newsweekly, he could find someone to proofread his ballot argument against Prop. H, the public power measure. Apparently not.

The gist of Fang’s argument is this: Asian-Americans (actually, he describes them as “Asian American’s” in the first sentence) make up a significant portion of the city’s population, but were never consulted about Prop. H before it went on the ballot.

“To make matters even worse,” Fang writes, “under Proposition H, the people of San Francisco, again, remember, we are over one-third of San Francisco’s population, will have to pay PG&E $4 billion dollars in order for the City to have the right to operate our utilities.”

Uhhhh, okay. If I understand the first part of that sentence correctly, the people of San Francisco make up one-third of San Francisco’s population. Like most journalists, I suck at math, but I’m pretty sure Fang’s numbers are off there.

In the very next sentence, he offers this head-scratcher: “While I never claim to be a mathematician, but how can have lower if we first have to pay a whopping 4 billion dollars!”

I never claim(ed) to be a grammarian, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say there are some words missing in that line.