When the city’s Department of Elections ran its second preliminary round of ranked choice voting scores Nov. 9, neither of the leading D10 contenders was in attendance. Malia Cohen, who was sick last week, was still under the weather, according to her campaign manager Megan Hamilton. And Tony Kelly was at home “reading the Bible and eating chocolate,” as he jokingly told the Guardian earlier that afternoon. All of which was hardly surprising since the stress of the unrevolved races in D10 (and D2) is beginning to fray the nerves of even the most hardened elections veterans.
But Marlene Tran, who ended up in third place after yesterday’s RCV count, was waiting outside the Elections office, which is located in the basement of City Hall. And she openly talked about the stress of waiting for the ranked choice results, the failure of English-speaking media to cover issues that concern non-English speaking residents, the unexpected attacks she endured on Chinese radio, and her hope that all the D10 candidates will work together to make the district and its various communities and neighborhoods a better place to live, regardless of who wins.
“I’ve been trying to take care of all my mail and petting my cat, who is extremely demanding,” Tran told the Guardian, when asked how she was dealing with a waiting game that has had campaign managers and members of the media descending daily on the Elections Department at 4 p.m. to get updated results.
Finally, Elections Department director John Arntz emerged and sat on a table outside the Department of Elections office as he gave his daily update.
“We did a big push over the weekend to get 95 percent of the cards processed,” Arntz said, noting that 10,000-11,000 vote-by-mails remain to be counted citywide. He also noted that of the 1,275 provisional ballots from D10, 1,044 have been accepted, and another 231 have been challenged.
“We’ll have a tally sheet tomorrow with reasons why the provisionals were challenged,” Arntz added, observing that one reason provisionals get challenged is when it turns out that folks who voted provisionally aren’t actually registered to vote in San Francisco.
“I think it will be next week until we get to all the provisional ballots,” Arntz continued.“But it’s not like I am trying to prolong anything. I’m guesstimating that all the vote-by-mail ballots will be counted by Friday. So, we may do another ranked choice count on Friday.”
Arntz clarified that the 75 ballots that were found floating in the Palace of Fine Arts pond in the Marina district originated from a polling station in D11—and therefore will not impact the as yet unresolved supervisoral races in D10 and D2, where Janet Reilly leads Mark Farrell in raw first choice votes, but has been slipping into second place when the ranked choice votes are calculated.
“The bag is sealed, but the ballots are damp,” Arntz said of the missing D11 ballots.
After Arntz was done with his daily dose of explaining, the ever outspoken Sharen Hewitt, executive director of the C.L.A.E.R. project, warned of the importance of counting every provisional vote.
‘If anyone touches my granddaughter vote, they’ll be a tsunami,” Hewitt warned, referring to the fact that her 18-year-old granddaughter Tiara voted provisionally this year. “And it seems that a disproportionate numbers of challenged provisionals seem to be coming from Bayview Hunters Point.”
Afterwards, as the running dogs of the media rushed off to file stories, Tran lingered long enough to tell the Guardian how she was attacked on afternoon programs on Chinese radio after she announced that Tony Kelly was her second choice in the race (with her first choice being herself, natch.)
“I was called a traitor, I was told I was too old to run, that I can hardly walk around, that I didn’t do anything for the community in 20 years,” Tran recalled. “It was very humiliating.”
But she believes the attacks may have backfired.
“The radio programs in the evening addressed the question of whether Tran deserved to be a traitor—and everyone was very supportive of me,” Tran said. “And everybody who heard about these attacks was very angry, so maybe they worked harder to support me.”
Tran says she didn’t hire a political consultant to manage her campaign, but still found herself ahead of most of the other 21 candidates in this hotly contested race.
“I did a lot of stuff with volunteers, and for the first few months I did everything myself, including the design and layout of my fliers,” Tran confided, showing me a tri-lingual flier which includes translations from Chinese media outlets Sing Tao, which called her the “Guardian Angel of Immigrants.”
Tran, who was born in Hong Kong, and came to the United States when she was 19, says she is grateful that she got to live and work in such a beautiful city, and that many first-time voters got invigorated and decided to participate in the election because she was running.
“Whoever gets elected, I’ll support that person, because this is about D10 and San Francisco,” Tran said. ‘but many voters are now wondering if ranked choice is the best thing, because of the endless wait.”
She also ruminated on what she describes as the “chasm of a communication problem between the ethnic and Western press” and how that worked for and against her in past elections.
“When I ran for DCCC in 1998, I felt like a grain of sand in the Sahara,” Tran said, recalling how folks were surprised when she won that race. “And this time, my results are pretty healthy in the D10 race, and people are also surprised.”
Many of the absentee ballots that have been counted in recent days originated in Viz Valley, giving Tran a boost that takes her to second-place once ranked choices get reassigned, and helps Cohen vault over Lynette Sweet and into first place. But as they say, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings, so stay tuned…