The wait continues (with Leno still ahead), but we can start to see some trends.
London Breed announced today that
not only did I get the majority of first-place votes, I basically won in about nine of 11 districts in this city. As we watch the results pour in, I think that sends a strong message.
Well, not exactly. Not even close. Not if you consider that the votes for Jane Kim were, overwhelmingly, votes against London Breed: More than 75 percent of her second-place votes went to Leno.
So if you look at the Leno-Kim ticket as a single candidate – the Not London Breed candidate – that candidate won in five of the 11 districts. In not one district did Breed get 50 percent.
The numbers we have show that Leno’s lead has shrunk a bit – by 25 votes, in fact.
Mission Local, which has been doing an excellent job (way better than the Chron) covering this election, argues that there’s no way Breed can win, given current voting trends:
At the rate Breed picked up those 25 votes, by the way, she would need an additional 224,000 ballots to be processed by the Department of Elections — which far, far exceeds the 90,000 or so uncounted ballots the city estimates are left to count. In other words, Breed gained some votes today, but not at a tenable pace. As more and more ballots come in, however, that pace may quicken. Or it may not.
According to the Department of Election, the 4,300 votes that were counted today were the first of the 16,000 vote-by-mail ballots that were delivered by the Post Office on Election Day. They expect to count the rest by tomorrow.
But there are lots left, according to DOE:
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.
Vote-by-mail ballots may continue to arrive and be reviewed for counting when they are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive by Friday, June 8.
The Department expects to continue reviewing and processing vote-by-mail ballots through early next week. The initial review of provisional ballots will begin Thursday, June 7, and will continue for several more days. The counting of provisional ballots will begin after the vote-by-mail ballots are reviewed.
The votes counted today largely to be breaking the way that Election Day votes did, with a few exceptions. Jane Kim did better on Election Day than Mark Leno; the ballots just counted show Leno slightly ahead of Kim. But they don’t reflect the very conservative trend of the early vote by mail.
That fits with the traditional pattern in San Francisco; election-day VBMs tend to break about the way election-day votes do.
This is so close that even a few points in one direction or another could change the outcome. But in the past, candidates who were ahead by more than 1,000 votes at this point in the process – and who picked up votes on Election Day – have fared pretty well.
You can’t blame the Chron, which has relatively early print deadlines, for coming out this morning with a “Breed leads” headline; we have all been there.
But I had to gasp at their editorial, which states:
“There was no doubt about which candidate had the most cause for optimism: London Breed. She took a solid lead over Mare Leno and Jane Kim in early returns … But overall, the returns defied the contention in some quarters that San Francisco was ripe for a progressive revolt.”
Excuse me: Mandelman won in D8, giving progressives control of the Board of Supes. Leno may well win after a huge progressive Kim voter turnout – in which case we would have a progressive mayor and board majority for the first time in more years than most of us can remember. Prop. F passed. Prop. H went down.
I fear the Chron editorial writers aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in their city.
