Why Was the Only Non-Secular Delegate Polling Site In Northern California Picked for the State's Most Pro-Ceasefire Assembly District? And Overseen by a Militant JCRC Member Who Ran Out of Ballots?
In neighboring East Bay AD14, ballots ran out halfway through election and voter ID PINs didn’t work. So why are East Bay progressives shying from legal action or even mentioning it in press releases?
On Sunday, February 23, 2025, millions of California voters had the opportunity to vote in-person for California’s (very) influential Democratic Party delegates. But they could do so only if they were among the lucky, small percentage who were actually informed that the election was happening. Most Democrats were not informed of the delegate election — even as they continued to receive email and text solicitations from the Democratic Party for more donations.
And Californians could only vote for these influential state Democratic Party delegates if they could make it in-person to one of the approximately two dozen polling sites spread throughout the state (mostly along the coast). And as long as those polling sites had sufficient ballots.
In Assembly District 14, which includes Alameda and Contra Costa, where bold ceasefire resolutions and strong divestment from Israel had succeeded relatively early, there was only one polling site for the delegate election. That polling site was in Berkeley, which is run by a pro-Israel City Council, and it was held at pro-Israel Temple Beth Israel.
Beth Israel was the only non-secular polling site in all of Northern California in this delegate election. And for this polling site, Democratic officials only supplied 250 ballots for a district that had previously drawn 1,800 voters in delegate elections.
Temple Beth Israel, whose congregants have taken a determinedly pro-Israel position, was not a neutral location for many residents who had been previously targeted by the Israel lobby. Some of the most infamous targeting of Palestinian activists has occurred in Berkeley, and was previously documented in The New Yorker and The Nation magazines, but totally ignored by local media. More rudimentary but no less alarming Islamophobic attacks were ongoing as of last week, which local media did manage to report.
But if the non-secular, pro-Israel location wasn’t intimidation enough, the “convener” or organizer/overseer of the polling site was Trish Munro, a militant member of the Jewish Community Relations Council’s “BANJO” network. Munro had penned an infamous genocide-denying article last July, months after the ICJ case against Israel’s genocide had been filed. (Munro had previously taken one of the JCRC’s all-expenses-paid junkets to Israel in 2023, and photos show she may have attended the JCRC’s Camp Newman event with the FBI and US Attorneys later that year.)
A screenshot of how JCRC describes BANJO, which has been very active in targeting ceasefire proponents in the Bay Area:
Who could have predicted that, at a non-neutral polling site, overseen by a non-neutral Convener, there would be any voting irregularities? Surprise, surprise, surprise: at the AD14 in-person polling site, ballots ran out early amid ongoing issues with voter ID numbers. As more than one Democratic voter asked, “This is voter suppression, isn't it?”
To understand why AD14 was targeted in this manner, it’s important to look not only at the racial and ethnic composition of the district, but at its politics.
I. What Makes Assembly District 14 Different From Other Districts?
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the state, the distinctions between a centrist, pro-Israel slate and an “underdog” pro-ceasefire slate were most pronounced in California’s Assembly District 14, in which nonwhite populations constitute a majority.
The East Bay’s AD14 comprises a large part of Alameda County and Contra Costa County, including Richmond, which notably produced a bracingly strong ceasefire resolution, the first in the entire United States. Six months later, Richmond became the second US city, after Hayward (AD20), to officially start divesting from Israel-linked companies. (Alameda County itself later began to divest from companies doing business with Israel.)
Richmond is majority Latino; Hayward is majority Asian, and both cities’ local elected bodies strive to represent the wishes of their nonwhite majorities, no less so than on the issue of Israel/Palestine.
AD14 also comprises a large part of Alameda County, which includes UC Berkeley’s international (and majority Asian) student population, many of whom have been actively engaged in protesting Israel’s genocide and other Israeli war crimes in Gaza in the post-October 7 era.
Thus, AD14, with its large non-white population, was a district that would seem to favor pro-ceasefire, pro-Palestinian delegate candidates.
What, then, might intimidate those AD14 voters from trying to vote in-person? How about hosting the only in-person site inside a decidedly pro-Israel venue and convened by a militant JCRC/BANJO member?
Per CADEM Regional Director Jeff Koertzen, the non-secular polling location in Berkeley (at Temple Beth Israel) was chosen three weeks ahead of the actual in-person polling date.
Given that much notice, there could have been an effort to find a secular location (an ostensibly simple choice given all the secular government offices, school buildings, union halls, etc.)
Or, failing that, Democratic officials could have reached out to local Muslim and Arab communities and ask some of their community’s leaders to serve as co-conveners at Temple Beth Israel. This would have mitigated the potential for complaints of bias or intimidation.
But that, of course, didn’t happen. No one bothered, because voting rights, fuhgeddaboutit.
II. Video
The hour-plus of video I recorded at the polling site shows how a voting process that was designed to favor white homeowners failed even that group.
The video shows Convener Trish Munro’s often contemptuous treatment of those trying to vote, and angry denial of concerns responsibly brought forward about the possibility of bias or favoritism in the process.
But Munro’s responsibility as convener was not to deny that the process was flawed – rather, it was to take record of the voters’ concerns. Munro cannot claim ignorance: prior articles she published make clear she was well aware that a non-secular polling site itself would be controversial.
The video also shows Munro objecting to my responsible and civil filming of irregularities at the site. Munro’s complaint is transparent: she was attempting to dissuade or otherwise prevent me from filming, which was both my right and my obligation under the circumstances.
Additional video also shows a notorious pro-Israel resident of Berkeley badgering a male voter who was civilly trying to register a complaint about the process. The same pro-Israel resident then tried to intimidate me from recording, and when I left the camera in its static position, she placed her large body in front of it to block the camera. The same pro-Israel resident has reportedly filed multiple bogus complaints against local schoolteachers for alleged “antisemitism.”
White Voters Disadvantaged Almost As Much As Non-White Voters At Temple Beth Israel:
In an assembly district with a large percentage of politically engaged nonwhite voters, the vast majority of those who showed up to vote in person at Berkeley’s Temple Beth Israel were white, and many of them still did not get to vote due to the dysfunctional process.
Most of the voters who showed up repeated the same complaint: that they had only found out about the election at the last minute. (Per one white voter, they were informed the day before, during Schul.)
In the roughly two hours that I was present at the site, I saw only one Muslim or Arab resident. I was later informed by another resident that in the approximate two hour period from noon to 2:00 pm, there were all of two Muslim or Arab voters who showed up to try to vote.
I witnessed only a few Asian American voters show up to try to vote at Beth Israel — and this is in a district that includes the University of California, which is over 50% Asian, with many of those voters eligible to vote.
Similarly, very few Black or Latino voters were present.
Asian Americans Voters Express Dissatisfaction With Process
The few Asian American voters present expressed extreme unhappiness with the dysfunctional delegate voting process. As a group, Asian American voters have, like Black and Latino voting groups, long demonstrated more loyalty to the Democratic Party than have white voters. But there has been an increasing sense of hopelessness about the Democratic party after last November’s election, and the difficulties at Temple Beth Israel weren't helping.
“How are we going to win any seats in 2026 if we can’t even run a local delegate election?” asked an elderly Asian resident.
III. A Resolution
By Monday, a weak press release was issued by some well-meaning white progressives that, while raising concerns about irregularities, largely downplayed the severity of what had occurred, and made no mention of the non-neutral polling site or the designated convener.
By Wednesday night, a less timid voice appeared in the form of a resolution submitted to Alameda County’s Democratic Central Committee, penned by a progressive former Alameda County Central Committee member. It was subsequently signed by some current members, but reportedly rejected by the Alameda DCCC. The resolution had catalogued voting irregularities at the Beth Israel site, disenfranchisement due to a shortage of ballots, and proposed that going forward, only secular polling sites should be chosen. Seems reasonable.
But even if it had passed, resolutions, as we know, are made to be broken.
I mentioned the resolution to an attorney in Marin who suggested it would only have swept the issue under the rug, and said that it would be more effective to find an election attorney to file a lawsuit. (When people in Marin recommend stronger remedies than the “left” does in Berkeley, you have to wonder what has happened to Berkeley.)
IV. Follow-up Interviews With Munro, Tregub, and Koertzen
Response from Official Delegate Polling Convener Trish Munro:
On February 27, I spoke with “Convener” Trish Munro, who insisted that only Jeff Koertzen would be answering questions. In defiance of her own instructions, she then proceeded to talk for over 20 minutes. During that time, Munro denied that there was any voter suppression or voting irregularities, repeatedly insisting that there was nothing inappropriate about the polling location, and that everyone should all be grateful that Temple Beth Israel had selflessly offered itself as a location.
Munro then demanded to know if I would be asking the same questions if the polling site had been held in a mosque.
“Absolutely,” I answered. “I would be asking the same question if the only in-person polling site in all of Northern California were held in a Greek Orthodox Cathedral, a Chinese Presbyterian Church, a mosque, or a synagogue.”
Munro then said criticism of her oversight of the process was very unfair since she didn’t get to eat for the entire four hours. She had done her “very best”, Munro maintained, and it wasn’t her fault that they ran out of ballots.
There was a depressing irony in the well-fed and fiercely pro-Israel Munro saying that she had been deprived of food for four hours (the video contradicts her claim as she is seen eating during the polling process), during a week when Israel continued to brag that it was depriving Gaza of humanitarian aid. Our conversation took place a day before Ramadan started, and days before Orthodox Lent was to begin. Gaza’s remaining Muslims and even smaller Greek Orthodox population (Greek Orthodox remain the majority Christian population in Gaza) would once again have to try to survive the holidays without even sufficient food or water to maintain even sparse breaks in fasting.
But as Trish Munro had infamously written last July, what Israel is doing isn’t a genocide and “war is hell.” (So tough luck, women and children!) See excerpt of Munro’s alarming piece below, with its insistence that accusing Israel of genocide (a charge which the current case at the International Court of Justice deemed plausible) is “the ancient blood libel.” That paragraph alone should have disqualified Munro from any position within the Democratic Party. Instead, it’s probably won her additional access.
I asked Munro, “If the lack of ballots wasn’t your fault as the official convener, whose fault was it?”
Munro said the shortage of ballots was Jeff Koertzen’s fault. But how could it be entirely Koertzen’z fault if Munro herself had declined to secure a sufficient number of ballots?
Response from Alameda County Democratic Committee Executive Chair Igor Tregub:
Igor Tregub responded that he had only been involved in the polling fiasco as a “volunteer”, even though he is the Executive Chair of Alameda County’s Democratic Central Committee. Like Munro, he said I would have to talk with Regional Director Jeff Koertzen. Then, on Tuesday, March 4, Tregub sent me no fewer than five emails in the space of an hour denying that he bore any responsibility for the fiasco. Several of his emails insinuated that complaints about the polling site constituted antisemitism, a familiar boy-who-cried-wolf refrain with obvious limitations.
Response from Regional Director Jeff Koertzen:
During a phone call on February 27, 2025, the California Democratic Party’s Regional Director Jeff Koertzen said he accepted full responsibility for the polling fiasco, especially the sparse 250 ballots he delivered to the site. He said he thought the number would be sufficient, even though AD14 delegate elections have previously drawn as many as 1,800 in-person voters.
Koertzen offered a nominal apology before stating repeatedly that any claims that there were civil rights violations or voter suppression were “ridiculous.”
Koertzen claimed that he had worked with:
“…at least four Muslim people while I was there, at least whom I identified as Muslim simply because of um, the, um, headdress?”
“Headdress?” I asked him. “What do you mean by headdress?”
Koertzen seemed to become nervous at the question. “I’m simply saying,” he began, with what seemed like unnecessary defensiveness, “I’m simply saying that they had the, um,” and then his tone went from defensive to annoyed bitchiness: “I don’t know the proper term….One moment,” Koertzen instructed me, and I could hear him tapping into his computer.
Finally, after a long moment of silence, he said, “whether it’s hijab… or some other scarf.”
Was Koertzen looking for the term keffiyeh? “Are you talking about a keffiyeh?”
Koertzen responded tersely and defensively, “I don’t know.”
I asked him, “Are you talking about the traditional Palestinian scarf, the keffiyeh?”
“Yes,” he said. But then he changed his mind, “No,” he said the annoyed tone returning, “not the keffiyeh. I understand that some people… You’re trying to get me caught up in something–“
“No, I’m not. I’m just trying to understand what you’re saying, Mr. Koertzen.”
Koertzen then slowed down. “How did you recognize the Muslim person that you saw?”
I explained to him the demographics in the room, and that I identified the only Muslim voter in the room because I happened to know them, and that they and I and another woman, who is Jewish, had discussed our concerns about the polling site being intimidating to Muslims, Arabs, and to pro-Palestinian activists who had previously been targeted by various pro-Israel lobbies here in the Bay Area.
Koertzen then changed the topic and tried to claim that because he didn’t live in the community, there was no way that he could have known that Temple Beth Israel would have been intimidating to Arab or Muslim voters.
But his claim was not credible given all of the Israel lobby’s targeting of Arabs, Muslims, and pro-Palestinian activists that had occurred in California over the last seventeen months of Israel’s genocide, and which has so often weaponized Jewish institutions and symbols.
What is interesting to me about the conversation with Koertzen is that he did not take seriously my concerns about Muslims or Arabs feeling intimidated by the synagogue as location. It was only when I said that I personally felt discomfort in that pro-Israel polling site in part because of how Israel had been decimating the remaining Greek Orthodox population in Gaza that Koertzen softened and offered an apology.
I then told Koertzen that by extension, I also had concerns about how Muslims and Arabs must have felt having to negotiate that voting site. That's when Koertzen snapped back into bitchiness and resumed calling concerns about voter suppression “ridiculous.”
And this is the Democratic Party in a nutshell. If I speak up for Christians in Gaza, I may do so and I will even be offered an apology from the State Democratic Party’s Regional Director Jeff Koertzen.
But if I want to speak up for Muslims and Arabs here in California, well, that is, in Koertzen’s words, “ridiculous.”
IV. What Is/Was Our Responsibility/Obligation In This Situation?
In the February 22 substack article, I had included notice of the polling site at Beth Israel but I did not state that the non-secular site would obviously be a deterrent to voters: Not only for many Palestinians, but for other Arab people, for many Muslims, and for pro-Palestinian activists who have been targeted by the JCRC and other Israel lobby groups active in Northern California. I had a responsibility to communicate that concern in the article, and I failed.
Over the last two weeks I’ve struggled to understand the weak response from others on the left. The Wellstone Democratic Club sent an email to the local DCCC in which they mentioned the lack of ballots and nonfunctioning voter ID PINs, but they made no mention of the polling site or convener as presenting any sort of civil rights violation. Notably, the WDC did not issue any press release even about the lack of ballots; this was all to be dealt with internally, which is to say, not at all.
Nor does it appear that the head of the progressive slate, Alfred Twu, had issued any public statement. When I contacted Twu on Friday March 7, I asked them how much advance notice they had of the polling site.
Twu stated that he had two weeks notice prior to the February 23 in-person polling date.
Given the connections to unions (and thus union halls) within the progressive slate, that seemed like enough time to advocate for an alternate nonsecular polling site and convener. I asked Twu if they had ever asked for an alternate site. Twu stated they had not.
I asked Twu if they understood why Beth Israel as a site was problematic, and Twu hesitated before saying coyly, “maybe because people are different religions?”
Twu claimed not to be aware of any other deterrents that decidedly pro-Israel Temple Beth Israel, imposed as the only in-person polling site in all of AD14, for Arab, Muslim or pro-Palestinians voters.
Twu’s claim seemed to me difficult to believe.
That same week, many emails had been exchanged between supporters of the progressive slate and Igor Tregub regarding the inappropriateness of Beth Israel as a polling site. But none of these complaints appeared to be sent to media or distributed in any other public venue. Nor had they been presented at Berkeley City Council on the Tuesday after the election, which would traditionally be a means of sharing anything that goes wrong in the City of Berkeley, even within the new, abbreviated public comment period.
Maybe there was an attempt to sweep it under the rug.
And despite Trish Munro being the official convener of the polling site, the “progressive left” of Berkeley was largely unwilling to ask any questions of Munro, preferring to pile onto Tregub.
When I tried to attend the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee meeting on Wednesday night, February 5, in order to ask questions about the delegate voting “irregularities”, I was stymied by multiple factors:
1. The meeting was held at an industrial park in Hayward, which was challenging to reach not only because of the distance by car or bicycle, but because it was not very close to public transportation. (I found myself after an unfortunate run-in with a car having to turn around in San Leandro without ever reaching Hayward – the Bay Trail bike path is beautiful, but the connecting roads are dangerous, even for longtime cyclists like myself.)
And if it was impossible for me to get there, consider how hard this meeting site was for most disabled residents who might lack a car.
2. The meeting was not open to public participation by zoom. Again, this is a willful block against the majority of workingclass and of disabled residents who want to attend.
3. The meeting was only live-streamed on facebook, which further limited public participation. Many people are more likely to use zoom for meetings, and thus do not have facebook.
But few progressives in Berkeley, once the home of disability rights activism, seemed to find these tightened restrictions on public participation worth fighting, or even mentioning. Even after getting walloped by the worst Democrats in the delegate election, progressives seemed unwilling to risk demanding that the Party itself become more open to ordinary people. Who were they afraid of offending? When had Berkeley become Marin County?
In the end, it is a simple arithmetic. If local progressive Democrats continue with what seems increasingly like a kind of “pick me!” theater kid mentality while the rest of the necessary public is shut out of even DCCC meetings, how will they ever garner sufficient votes? If, out of short-sighted convenience (or their own conviction that they are playing some kind of six-dimensional chess), they acquiesce to polling sites, conveners and even DCCC meeting sites that restrict the very minority voters they need, how will they ever win?
Leaving the Democratic Party has always seemed to me an impossible task, it is the Party to which both sides of my family in America have always belonged, and those elderly relatives I loved most were so saved by FDR’s administration that they abandoned their ikons for a painting of Eleanor Roosevelt in their kitchen. But on Wednesday night, as I rode home against the surprisingly strong wind on the Bay Trail out of San Leandro, it seemed clear that the Party was irredeemable.
Frankly, I am ashamed that it has taken me until now.
All Is Not Lost:
The Friday after the disastrous California delegate election, hundreds of thousands of workers banded together in Athens and other cities across Greece in a hard-headed general strike against their center-right government. People whom you could not normally get to agree on much still managed to march together en masse, seeming to care little about the police who tear-gassed them. (In France, somebody torched a Tesla showroom.)
The Greeks were protesting a rail accident that had claimed a mere 57 people a full two years ago, an accident delivered by the Greek government’s US-style, neoliberal policies. In the US, we lost more people in a plane crash over the Potomac on January 31, but life is so cheap here in America that we have immediately memory-holed it, apparently. But workers in Greece hadn’t forgotten the lives lost two years ago, and they were willing to go out on the street and fight in their memory.
I bring this up because it seems that, somewhere in the birthplace of democracy, people still understand that representative democracy isn’t sufficient; in fact, representative democracy isn't even democracy.
So there is hope, and not just abroad. Even in America, the Taxpayers Against Genocide movement is growing well beyond its North Bay origins. I hope to write about that next.
Many thanks as always to patient readers.
©️2025 Eva Chrysanthe