New election results are out, and Mayor Gavin Newsom’s winning percentage continues to drop. He’s gone from the high 70s in early returns to 68 percent now. Quintn Mecke is now in second place, with almost 8 percent, and Harold Hoogasian is in third with 6.5 percent. These numbers will change more, and probably not in Newsom’s favor: Although the results page says that 94 percent of the precincts have been counted, only about half of the mayoral votes are tallied so far. That’s because the counting machines don’t handle ranked-choice voting the way they’re supposed to, so unless a voter fills in three choices for mayor, the machine kicks the ballot out and it has to be hand counted.
So look at Newsom coming in with a final vote of less than 65 percent. It’s almost certain that he’ll get fewer votes than he did last fime around (although that was a tightly contested election.)
Prop. A continues to widen its margin of victory. Oddly, though, and quite inconsistent with my election-night proclamations, Prop. E, the question-time measure, is actually LOSING votes as the election-day precinct totals come in. That’s a surprise — typically progressive measures that lag in the absentee count pick up several points, and sometimes more, when the precincts are tallied.
It’s not over yet — there are still 40,000 more absentee votes out there.