By Tim Redmond
It’s astonishing to me that in this modern age, San Francisco still can’t get the votes counted on election night. I understand that the Department of Elections was overwhelmed by absentee ballots, but if we’re becoming a vote-by-mail city — and it appears we are, since almost half the votes this time will be absentee — then we should be prepared for it. If that means extra DOE staff in the two weeks before Election Day to tally those votes and have them ready to go, then it’s worth doing.
Anyway, that’s not where we are; where we are is that 100,000 more votes still have to be counted, and DOE director John Arnst says that won’t be finished for a couple of weeks.
And then there’s the matter of ranked-choice voting. Arnst has decided not to even begin running the RCV program until Friday, so we won’t have even unofficial results until then.
But here’s how it looks right now:
In district one, Eric Mar has 42 percent of the vote, and his closest competitor, Sue Lee, is 10 points behind. Lee just narrowly edged Mar in the first round of absentees; she was ahead 33 percent to 32 percent. So even if there are 9000 absentees in this district, AND they split as pro-Lee as the early absentees did, Mar would still be far ahead. In order to make up the 1,700 vote margin, Lee would have to win about 60 percent of the remaining votes tha goe for her or Mar, which seems highly unlikely. And if Mar is above 40 percent and needs only 10 percent more from the second- and third-place votes, he’s in very good shape. I’d say this one is pretty darn close to over.
In district three, David Chiu has 39 percent of the vote and the next in line is Joe Alioto, with 23 percent. Chiu actually came in first in the absentees. No way Alioto makes that difference up. Same as D1 — this one’s pretty safe.
D4, Carmen Chu. Re-elected.
D5, Ross Mirkarimi. Re-elected
D7. Sean Elsbernd. Re-Elected.
In District 9, David Campos has 35 percent of the vote, Mark Sanchez 29 and Eric Quezada 21. The absentees won’t change much here; Campos won the early absentees, Sanchez was second. This will come down to the Quezada votes; if they break about even (a good guess) Campos takes it. They could break overwhelmingly for Sanchez, but that’s the only way this one changes, and I doubt it will happen.
District 11 is interesting. John Avalos has 30 percent, to 24 for Ahsha Safai. Avalos beat Safai in the absentees — but in that group of voters, Myrna Lim, now at 16 percent, came in second. That suggests a heavily Asian absentee vote, and if the trend holds, Lim could pick up some more votes (athough there’s no way she could come in first, which is a very good thing.) The question is how Lim’s second-place votes break, because this one is close enough that seconds and thirds could really matter. The Avalos supporters knew that going in, and worked hard to run an RCV campaign, to reach out to Lim backers and urge them to vote Avalos #2. If that worked, he’s in.
We’ll know a lot more on Friday, when the DOE runs its first pass at RCV. I don’t understand why we have to wait that long; the program is simple, and they could run it right now. But wait we will.