With an additional 4,654 mail-in ballots having been added to last night’s election day tally, which now totals 158,944 (33 percent) of roughly 480,000 potential votes, with an estimated 85,000 ballots left to be tallied, Mark Leno’s ranked-choice lead over London Breed has narrowed by 25 votes to 1,121.

The latest tallies for the top four vote getters in the mayoral race is as follows, with the ranked-choice accounting outlined in the table above:

1. London Breed 35.68% (49.60% based on ranked choice result tallies)
2. Mark Leno 25.91% (50.40% based on ranked choice results)
3. Jane Kim 22.81% (CONCEDED)
4. Angela Alioto 7.54%

If the early trend for the previously uncounted ballots holds, Leno will become the next Mayor of San Francisco by a margin of around 660 votes (0.27 percent of all ballots cast).

19 thoughts on “Leno’s Lead in Mayoral Race Narrows”
    1. From sfgov.org:

      The Department continues to review approximately 87,000 ballots for processing. This total includes approximately 73,000 vote-by-mail ballots and an estimated 14,000 provisional ballots.

      The Department received 16,000 vote-by-mail ballots from the post office on Election Day and has tabulated votes from approximately 4,300 ballots, leaving a remainder of around 11,700 of this group of ballots.

      Today the Department received nearly 13,000 vote-by-mail ballots from the post office, most of which were postmarked on or before Election Day and will be processed.

      Voters delivered approximately 44,000 ballots to polling places on Election Day and those ballots remain to be processed.

      Voters also cast nearly 14,000 provisional ballots on Election Day and these ballots will not be processed until next week.

      The remaining unprocessed ballots consist of approximately 3,000 vote-by-mail ballots that voters delivered to City Hall Drop-Off Stations on Election Day as well as approximately 3,000 ballots cast at the City Hall Voting Center.

  1. “…Leno will become the next Mayor of San Francisco by a margin of around 660 votes”

    At which point expect:
    (1) Extended whinging and whining that “Breed had the lead (after Round 1)” and should have been the winner;
    (2) Savvy people to note that the margin of victory was less than the “undervotes” – which I assume means “no-one marked”. oh, but to be able to convince a few undecideds!

  2. What would be REALLY wild is if the remaining 85,000 ballots were heavily in favor of Kim, and switched her to 2nd place over Leno – because while Kim’s voters toed the line and hugely voted for Leno as their 2nd choice, I don’t think that that high of a % of Leno voters returned the favor. I imagine many of them are a bit more moderate than Kim voters. That would put Breed over Kim after ranked choices were all tabulated.

    1. Even in the unlikely event that Kim passes Leno into overall second place, what matters is the order of the last three candidates. Fourth place Alioto voters’ 2nd and 3rd choices almost definitely favor Leno over Kim, leaving the final three Breed, Leno, Kim in that order regardless.

      Breed’s team made a huge tactical mistake not pursuing a RCV strategy, the most obvious one being identity politics. “SF hasn’t had a woman mayor since Feinstein.” and “SF has never had a woman of color mayor.” Just switching some of Alioto’s 3rd place votes from Leno to Breed (Alioto, Kim, Breed) or knocking Leno to 3rd among enough Kim voters (Kim, Breed, Leno) would have won Breed the election.

      Look for Farrell to challenge Leno (should Leno prevail) next year with an excellent chance to unseat him.

      1. SF is awash in identity politics. Breed just had the less marketable identity (African American woman) than Leno (gay). Not as fashionable.

        I don’t think a straight white male can get elected here – even if it was Karl Marx.

        1. Oh the poor downtrodden white male. For most of SF’s history only white males could get elected. So now you’re whinning?

        2. It’s not about her identity or what is fashionable. She is the most conservative among the top three. Voters are more educated than that.

        3. San Francisco elected straight white males until Dianne Feinstein was elected. That’s decades of straight white and BTW mostly Republican mayors in the 20th century. SF’s population is now more than one third Asian and white people make up about 50%. Appx 15% of the total is LGBT. Women have been empowered by the grossly repugnant trump. Times have changed. “Identity politics” is code for “how’d those minorities get in here?”.

      2. Identity politics is wrong. People should vote based on merits and issues. It is the uneducated voter who can’t see beyond the must have black, gay, yellow, white at all costs mentality.

        1. Identity politics is a simple-minded lens for simple-minded people. Also a good way to manipulate people into voting, sometimes against their own interests.

      3. Most likely fewer people would have voted for Breed if she went the Identity Politics route. The demographics of SF is such that there aren’t very many black voters, and trying to say “vote for me since I am a woman” is going to be tough when 6 out of 8 candidates were women.

  3. Can someone clarify exactly what ‘Exhausted by Over Votes’, ‘Under Votes’ and ‘Exhausted Ballots’ mean?

    1. I think they mean, “Chose more than one candidate as their first, second or third choice.”, “Did not make any choices”, and “All top three choices were eliminated” respectively.

  4. All I know is we are apparently going to have a mayor that most of the city (60+%) doesn’t really want.

  5. Well, what do you expect with 8 candidates? If one of them had support from a majority, then no one would care about second order preferences. That no one does means we go to rank choice voting and accept that 60%+ of the city will not get their preferred member of the 8 candidates.

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