The Harvey Milk LGBQT Democratic Club, one of San Francisco’s most well-known political organizations and a stalwart for queer and progressive politics in the city, voted Tuesday to expel its former president for allegedly creating “fake members” to sway endorsements.
An internal investigation alleged that Jeffrey Kwong, who served as club president from January 2023 until he stepped down in late August, was “misusing member data, impersonating members to circumvent the endorsement process, and attempting to delete the Club’s accounts in order to get rid of incriminating data, files, and emails,” according to materials obtained by Mission Local.
Kwong subsequently deleted “hundreds of emails and files” in a bid to “impede the investigation,” the club alleged, and changed the password to a club email account to retain access.
Kwong, for his part, denied the accusations. “I have not done any of that. I do not have knowledge of that,” he told Mission Local. “They claim to have evidence of that, but I have not participated in the investigation process.”
In August, the club found that numerous votes were “compromised,” leading members to re-vote a week later and change several endorsements for the Nov. 5 election.
The club subsequently launched an investigation, and its 12-member board unanimously recommended expulsion for Kwong in late December. Milk Club members subsequently ratified the board vote on Tuesday, barring Kwong from attending any club events.
The ex-president’s method, according to several sources, was simple: He allegedly created new member accounts and used the accounts of non-voting members — who, for instance, had not paid their dues — to vote for particular candidates and measures. Kwong allegedly created several Zoom accounts to vote in endorsement meetings, and turned their screens off during the calls.
“He made completely fake people as members,” said one person close to the investigation, “and then he found dormant members, and made them eligible to vote.” Kwong allegedly used those members’ accounts to swing the club’s picks.
Additionally, the club wrote, Kwong allegedly “took the Club’s property out of storage and took it to his residence, and has now decided to use it as leverage for reimbursements … He has repeatedly refused to accept responsibility for his actions or engage with us.”
The club, the documents continued, is working with a lawyer “to resolve this matter.”
The Harvey Milk Club, like other Democratic clubs in the city, is a member organization that votes on endorsing ballot measures and candidates. The club’s endorsement can be influential, and it spent about $100,000 on voter guides in 2024 advertising its endorsements.
The club’s picks in the November election changed in the re-vote following Kwong’s resignation. Its endorsement regarding Prop. K, to close the Great Highway, swung from No to Yes, for instance, and the club rescinded its endorsement of state Sen. Scott Wiener.
Several members, however, could not see a clear rhyme or reason for Kwong’s alleged manipulation.
Kwong, in a statement to Mission Local Wednesday denying the allegations, did not delve into specifics, but said he rejected “the unfounded and politically motivated allegations being made against me … This is not about facts — it’s about attacking me to distract from their own shortcomings.”
In messages sent to the club in mid-December, Kwong preemptively resigned his post. “I have repeatedly attempted to reach you by phone and by text, to no avail,” Kwong wrote. “Effective immediately, I resign as a member of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, concluding seven years of board service.”
Kwong also said that he had accrued thousands of dollars in credit card bills paying for club expenses that were not reimbursed. As to the storage unit: After he resigned last year, he said, the lease on the unit lapsed and he took the contents within to prevent them from being tossed. “What am I supposed to do, just let them throw it out?” he said.
He subsequently moved the items, some of which he said he had paid for, to his basement, where they remain. “The dry cleaner doesn’t give you your laundry back if you haven’t paid for the dry cleaning.”
Kwong also wrote that he reserved “all rights to pursue legal remedies to protect my reputation against defamatory claims.”
Kwong, the club noted in its materials, “did not provide any evidence” against the allegations, and “did not reply to multiple interview requests.” In a Thursday statement, the club further detailed its investigative process, saying it pored through “hundreds of pages” of evidence.
The club, for its part, wrote that it would move forward with an “integrity and accountability working group” to make recommendations and prevent future scandals.
Would love an ML explainer some time about how the clubs became such a Thing in SF politics. I’ve never lived anywhere else where orgs like this have such prominence and (apparent?) influence, and I’m genuinely curious how that came about.
It’d be gross how cutthroat the local Democratic club endorsement battles get (e.g. the Bernal Heights club vote drama, and now this) if they weren’t so petty and ridiculous. Imagine sitting in front of a handful of tablets and phones, doing mass sockpuppeting, to rig an endorsement vote.
This is not the first time the Harvey Milk club has been involved in such problems. A few years ago, I was an enthusiastic participant in the meetings. However, I eventually grew weary of the constant conflicts and the ruthless, almost cutthroat behavior. The core issue isn’t about clear voting and respecting outcomes; it’s driven by hidden political agendas that people are determined to push through at any cost. They seem indifferent to the harm they cause along the way, resembling a relentless mob of gangsters who stop at nothing to get their way.
Yet another instance sociopathic behavior out of Ivy League business, law or political science schools. There’s something about the achievatron trajectory that selects for people who can compartmentalize off their basic humanity in service of their ambitions.
Well at least he did not push someone off the subway platform which seems to be the preference of people without any ‘ achieveatron’ ambitions…
Nice, low-bar excuses for fraud. How community friendly.
It takes an Ivy League degree to navigate the cut-throat world of storage unit leasing. Being a college dropout, I had to rent month to month next door to the animal rendering facility in India Basin.
Wish I were lying, but I’d probably need a MB to pull that off.
I took the middle path, took a decade to claw my BA out of the Edwards Aquifer limestone rock. This was back when Texas was communist, and the state heavily subsidized public education.
My first semester out the door at UT-Austin in the fall of 1980, UT was declared a “Public Ivy” in the mid 80s, cost $225 out the door. I got in on my SAT alone which was good bc I was a teenager with a lust for life, not an achievatron.
I used those subsidies to see Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Talking Heads, XTC, The Police and Bruce Springsteen that November, take way too much LSD and mushrooms, flunked out, did (at times meth fueled) working class shift work operating mainframe supercomputers and finally returned to Austin and managed to knock out the remaining degree hours before my anti-apartheid conviction was resolved on appeal to finality, rejected, and the university could expel me.
Working with non college educated people of all races from all backgrounds for 4 years was more instructive to my cloistered young white self than anything I learned in college. And I was making $8/hr in 1981, lived like a king and managed to fly to London in 1982 to hang in a South London squat and see the Clash twice in Brixton.
I had no experience with Ivy Leaguers until I did politics in SF and came across Gonzalez, Chiu, Campos, Mandelman and Wiener. When I coalesced my individual observations into a general case and named it, the first thing people said “you applied and did not get in and are jealous, right?” because that’s the governing logic of the achievatrons: “the size of the pie is fixed and we’re getting a slice and you are not.” Proles don’t even think about applying to even the outer party.
I’ve got friends with Ivy League degrees in fields other than political science, business and law who are perfectly normal human beings. But they have little say over the reality in which we’re forced to live.
The point of higher ed should be to teach you how to structure your thinking and analysis so that you can teach yourself anything by teaching one subject in depth. At these schools in the Ivys, the point is not that, but to transmit elite rules of engagement, build relationships and advance oneself over others.
Saw my first concert at the Austin Opera House. Midnight Oil, 1988. Peter Garrett laughed and started pointing out all the R.E.M. t-shirts in the crowd. Sign of the times.
Iggy Pop and Joan Jett played at the Opry House in November 1980. I think that I saw REM at the Opry House in 1983 also on a trip down to Austin from Dallas. South Congress by Academy is a YIMBY SimCity experience scape, with the Opry House and Soap Creek Saloon both demolished in favor of housing.
The Southwet flight from Love Field to Austin took 45 minutes and since I was <= 22 years old, I got free beer. Smoking was also allowed, so the contest was to see how many free beers I could drink and how many cigarettes I could smoke on the short flight.
Midnight Oil was awesome. How can we sleep when our beds are burning, indeed. We've known about global warming for all of this time and done practically nothing.
I’m a high school dropout out, but I’m hung like a horse and leveraged that into 25 million dollars worth of dead presidents. Only in the queer paradise of San Francisco…
“I’m a high school dropout out” = nuff said said.