Election 2022: Final Tuesday reporting and analysis

10:54 p.m.: Good night and good luck

It won’t be clear until Wednesday morning how many outstanding votes there are to count, but there aren’t enough votes left to alter any of the issues on this ballot. The mayor will appoint three Board of Education members, and Matt Haney will face David Campos in an April runoff.

Barely more than a quarter of all registered voters have thus far had their ballots counted. It can’t get all that much higher.

The fate of San Francisco’s schools, and who’ll be blamed if and when things don’t go well, remains to be seen. As does who will next represent San Francisco in Sacramento.

But those are issues for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow … —Joe Eskenazi

9:50 p.m.: A few more votes to count

The second round of voting is in, with 9,108 day-of-election ballots to add to the nearly 120,000 that trickled in prior to Feb. 15. They will not do much to change the outcome for the Board of Education members, all of whom are polling on par with Juul e-cigarettes.

Only two percentage points stand between Assembly candidates Matt Haney and David Campos; these two will be facing off in April. You can expect an unpleasant campaign. You can expect Campos to attempt to lay the state of the Tenderloin at Haney’s feet. And you can also expect Campos to be branded an anti-housing zealot. It remains to be seen if he’ll be weighed down by his ties to Chesa Boudin and Ross Mirkarimi.

The winner of April’s election is back on the spot in June for another election to determine the top-two finishers for another another election in November. It remains to be seen if Bilal Mahmood will re-up for the June race. When asked about this by Mission Local’s Yujie Zhou, he replied “we will make a decision later.”

He has until March. —Joe Eskenazi

Photos from the campaign parties

9:26 p.m.: … And the campaigns react

Annika Hom reports from Matt Haney’s party:

The feeling is very confident here at District 6, and Haney looks relaxed with his lead.

“What came in as of yesterday as we are ahead; we are first place,” Haney said to loud claps and cheers.

When he asked the audience how many were out there campaigning today, at least a dozen hands raised.

“That’s how we won a few years ago to be the supervisor of this district. We’ve just been building a bigger and bigger coalition.”

Sharky Laguana, president of the small business commission, is here, as well as Broke-Ass Stuart.

Haney received extra applause when he mentioned housing, which he thinks distinguished him from his competitors. “We are fighting for that,” he said ” … We need tenant protections but we also need to build more housing. we put that message on the line.”

Eleni Balakrishnan reporting from the Campos party:

Jackie Fielder, who ran for state senate in 2020, said she was still confident in Campos’ ability to win in a runoff. “I know that his campaign will continue to stand up to big corporate interests,” said Fielder who called Campos’ campaign a sort of continuance of her own grassroots campaign. “And that’s why my political action committee Daybreak PAC endorsed David, when we learned about his candidacy.”

“Campos faced a lot of attacks trying to falsely accuse him of blocking housing. And it’s really just sad to see that,” Fielder said.

8:59 p.m.: And the early results are in

With 119,718 ballots in the can, the recall election totals look this way: 79 percent of voters want to give Alison Collins the boot. Board President Gabriela López is also underwater by a 75-25 count.  Commissioner Faauuga Moliga attempted to distinguish himself from his fellow recall targets, but still finds himself down 73-27.

Separate and apart from questions about the vast amounts of money pouring into the pro-recall race and its provenance, these numbers speak for themselves. 

“You can’t get 79 percent of people in San Francisco to agree on what day it is,” noted one longtime city campaign operative. The mountain of terrible takes will begin arriving posthaste, on East Coast time. But the fantastic unpopularity of the School Board, for many, many reasons, and the fuel Collins’ incendiary tweets, utter lack of contrition and ridiculous lawsuit added to the nascent recall fire cannot be ignored, regardless of what VCs or oligarchs donated to the recall effort, and what their motivations may have been.

In the race to succeed David Chiu in Sacramento, we predicted “a ‘coinflip’ finish for Campos and Haney with both polling in the mid-30s percentage-wise, plus or minus five points.” 

And that happened: Haney netted 38 percent, and Campos polled 35 percent in the preliminary voting. 

Bilal Mahmood came third, with 21 percent, while Thea Selby rounded out the pack at 6 percent. 

Mission Local’s Annika Hom, at Haney’s watch party in SoMa, reports that the candidate strode in at 9 to a massive cheer from both his stalwart supporters and his wingman, Supervisor Shamann Walton: “WHOOOOO!”

At Campos’ event, a stone’s throw away at the Eagle, Mission Local’s Eleni Balakrishnan says the crowd felt like a gathering of old friends: Hugging and eating Salvadoran snacks as the results put their preferred candidate in the catbird seat to make April’s runoff.

At Mahmood’s shindig in Chinatown, the atmosphere was more subdued. The first-time candidate’s gathering did not seem to catch the updated results as they came in. When Mission Local’s Yujie Zhou asked Mahmood how he felt, the candidate shrugged and said, “Good?”

A number of attendees felt good, too, despite the third-place showing. Friends or acquaintances of volunteers have shown up and are enjoying first-rate food, they told Zhou.

If these results hold up — and it would take a statistical anomaly for things to change; Mahmood is down 8,500-odd votes to Campos — Haney and Campos will face off in April to fill out the tail end of Chiu’s expiring term. But, by March, aspirants to the job have to file for the forthcoming June election, meaning you can bet Haney and Campos will both sign the dotted line, and Mahmood, who is, again, independently wealthy and largely self-financed, may do so as well. What’s more, the new boundary line for Assembly District 17 taking effect in June is considered to encompass more moderate-voting districts, a plus for Mahmood. 

More votes will be dropping at around 9:45, and more still at 10:45. Election Department boss John Arntz hopes to have clarity on just how many votes are outstanding by Wednesday morning.

We’ll be back in less than an hour. —Joe Eskenazi

8 p.m.: And now we wait

Pencils down. 

The polls have just closed, and it remains to be seen who’s in the Book of Life and who is not. 

Candidates’ election-night parties kick off now, and you can expect them to be essentially backlit with mobile phone screens. In about 45 minutes, the mobile phones will be shifted away from social media as people begin frantically clicking and refreshing on this link, the results page for the Department of Elections. 

Mission Local reporters are at the watch parties for Assembly aspirants David Campos and Matt Haney, about a block apart in SoMa, and Bilal Mahmood, who is holding his fete in Chinatown. 

At 8:45 or thereabouts, the first results will drop. Election Department boss John Arntz anticipates reporting around 120,000 ballots; ”most of the ballots we received before today.” 

This could be an appreciable percentage of the total number of ballots in this low-turnout special election. 

At 9:45 comes the second ballot drop from the Department of Elections. These will be votes from polling places. 

“We expect at least two additional reports after the first [8:45] report,” Arntz writes. “However, if results are slow from any polling places, we may need to issue an additional report or two.” 

In other words, this may not be a hurry up-and-wait situation but a hurry up-and-wait-and-wait-and-wait situation. 

The Department of Elections won’t know for sure how many total votes there are to count until perhaps 10 a.m. on Wednesday. 

In the meantime, in about 45 minutes, we’ll know a lot more. Stay tuned. —Joe Eskenazi

Scenes at City Hall, 6:30 p.m.

Laura Fox took the 19-Polk bus from the homeless navigation center in Bayview, and ambled up the steps to City Hall a little before 6 p.m. to drop off her ballot.The 75-year-old is a born-and-raised San Franciscan, and has cast ballots in each election. “I never try to miss one! It’s very important,” she said.

She forwarded her mail to the navigation center after she was evicted from Ingleside in September of last year. When it comes to the recall she voted to oust all three school board members. “Yes! Get them out!” She said emphatically. “Oh no, maybe I sound mean.”

Fox said they deserved the boot because, “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. You’re supposed to watch over our young people. And how are they going to change the [school] names to someone better than now. You don’t want Washington High anymore, why ? And no more Abraham Lincoln! Isn’t he the hero of our country?”

Mario, who jogged over to slip his ballot in the box, didn’t see things the same way. He voted no on the recall, which he called a “waste of money” he said, and declared his position as “the progressive vote!”

“It’s going backwards,” he said of recalls in general, “We are calling out people who were elected by the people. Of course, you don’t have to like every decision, but if you don’t like them, don’t re-elect them.”

Emory Bushlong, 70, was sharply dressed as he approached the ballot box by Polk and Grove streets. He said he usually votes earlier, but it was a busy day at the real estate office.

He said Matt Haney got his vote for Assembly primarily because Bushlong felt his housing policies are better than David Campos’. “I’m tired of the ‘We against They’ type of politics.”

Michael, 42, who brought his dog from the Inner Sunset, voted at City Hall after grabbing a po’ boy sandwich at Brenda’s. He said he now always votes at City Hall after running into some trouble with signature verification a few years ago. Since City Hall sends a message after his vote is counted, he prefers this site.

Michael, who is Filipino, plans on recalling on Alison Collins. “I didn’t like what she said about Asians and something about white supremacy,” he said. The other two Board of Education members on the block were spared because he learned the recall was backed by “Republican money” and he wanted to “make my voice heard that that won’t work here.” —Annika Hom

Slow going in Chinatown, 4:55 p.m.

“The number of Chinese people voting today may still be small,” said Ziwei Su, 62, in the lobby of City College’s Chinatown North Beach Campus. Behind him are five bored staffers glued to their posts and a woman in a red silk Tang suit, the only voter to visit this polling place in the past 40 minutes.

“I am very excited, and this school board recall election is my first time to vote,” said Su, who volunteers at the polling station today to help the monolingual seniors.

Su is a non-citizen parent whose child attends Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. Anger at the school board, both its “mismanagement” and the “unfair” new admission policy at Lowell, prompted him and his wife to cast their ballots early by mail, as most angry people would figure to do. 

“After this campaign, I learned more about the electoral system,” said Su. “Especially this new system, which is very democratic because there are many Chinese parents in San Francisco, many of whom are not yet citizens.” According to him, this is a group that could number in the tens of thousands.

Around noon, Su hurriedly left the polling place and walked to a barbed wire fence on Stockton Street. Here, several Chinese activists in traditional clothing were playing drums. One wore a tiger head and a dark blue robe embroidered with a dragon in gold thread.

“We are here to get everybody out to vote. America is made up of people from different cultures. We want to show our own culture,” said Bayard Fong, president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, dressed in a Mandarin coat and a straw hat.

Quincy Yu was wrapped in traditional Peking Opera costumes, holding a sign that read “Protect our children.” 

They will march down Stockton Street at 5 p.m., which is also the time poll workers expect a larger turnout of voters who are just getting off work. —Yujie Zhou

Afternoon in the Mission, 4:45 p.m.

Many Mission poll workers found today’s turnout to be “underwhelming,” as did Simon Phillips, who was working at the Bethany Center Senior Housing at 580 Capp St. this afternoon. Phillips said he got the sense that this election wasn’t a particularly exciting one for voters. 

His polling station colleague, Christina Stenstrom at Precinct 7907, wondered if precincts with more parents might see higher numbers of voters, adding that for her, the school board recall election “didn’t register” at all. 

The three polling stations we visited around 3 p.m. had received fewer than 100 ballots each, averaging about 20 voters who walked in to vote. 

“Unfortunately, this is a small election, or people feel that way,” said Cindy Arnold, 72, who was working at the ballot booth at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, Precinct 7913. “All elections are major in my opinion.” 

Arnold estimated her site had seen about 50 ballot drop-offs by around 3 p.m. today. The voting booth had only counted 23 votes. 

While she’s not supposed to encourage conversation with voters, Arnold said she heard a few under-the-breath comments from voters frustrated by the school board recall effort. 

“It’s bad,” said polling station inspector Livia Zuniga, 29, of today’s turnout at Precinct 7909. “I feel like a lot of people don’t know that today is an election day.” 

Zuniga, who grew up in the Mission and was working at the Mission Arts Center voting site today, said she thought people would at least come out to the polls to show support for former District 9 supervisor David Campos. But this didn’t seem to be the case; this is her fifth election, and her slowest. 

Like the rest of the city, most voter turnout in the September, 2021, election came through mail-in ballots, but those too are down, according to the Department of Elections. In September, Bethany Center had 58 in-person voters, compared to 561 mailed in. Cesar Chavez Elementary had 60 walk-ins and 493 mailed in, and Mission Arts Center on Treat Avenue had 45 walk-in voters in September and 433 mailed in. —Eleni Balakrishnan

Where to vote, 3 p.m.

If you’re having trouble finding out where to vote, the Department of Elections has put together a useful tool that shows you your nearest polling station. The tool also tells you about wait times and other useful information.

Take a look at their Voting site tool.

Morning in the Castro

The polls opened at 7 a.m. today, but by 9 a.m., few voters had appeared or dropped off ballots in the Castro precincts Mission Local visited. But if a few voters can indicate anything about the outcome, this election is all about the recall. The Assembly race hardly got a mention. 

Voters mentioned Alison Collins, in particular, as deserving of the boot. But if some pardoned Board President Gabriela López and Commissioner Faauuga Moliga, others lumped them together as worthy of a recall. 

At the Boys and Girls Club on Guerrero, Precinct 7813, Mike Kuniavsky said he voted to recall Collins “largely because she was toxic,” and López for “enabling” such behavior. Commissioner Faauuga Moliga saved himself by showing up at different public conversations to defend his record, Kuniavsky said. 

Like his wife, Elizabeth Goodman, Kuniavsky says he’s against recalls, but both agreed the school board members’ actions, especially Collins, needed to be addressed. “You don’t get to behave like Collins behaved,” said Goodman, who used her recall vote for Collins and will wait for regular elections to decide on the other two. For Goodman, the lawsuit Collins filed against the school district, was inexcusable.

The couple has spent too much time fundraising for basic field trips for their children at Rosa Parks Elementary school to have much patience with someone putting the district’s finances in even more peril, they said.  

The couple were among only four in-person votes and two dropped-off votes by 8:28 a..m. 

At the garage on Pond Street, Precinct 7817, just north of 17th Street, Simone, a poll worker, said they had collected 10 ballots by 9:12 a.m., most of those from people dropping off their ballots. It was the slowest election he had worked in his 16 years as a poll worker. 

Sally, at Precinct 7823, at 100 Collingwood, said they only had 50 voters throughout the day for the governor’s recall in September, and it was possible they would have as many today. 

Donna, who voted there, was also against recalls, but added: “These people deserved it.”

Michael Clements, who voted at Precinct 7826, set up at  Dolores Park Church on Dorland Street, voted to recall of all three board members. “They should have been focused on getting the schools open,” he said. 

It’s too early to tell how turnout will add up, but today’s recall starts out behind the September recall. Only 24 percent of San Francisco’s voters have mailed in their ballots. In all of the four precincts I visited this morning, mail-in ballots were high in September.

Turnout for four precincts in the September, 2021 election

—Lydia Chavez

Election Day begins!

Christmas may come but once a year, but we didn’t get to vote on that. In San Francisco we vote on most everything else. And, in the year 2022, we will go to the polls at least three times — and, all but certainly, four times — just to fill a simple Assembly seat. 

This is a lot to ask of any electorate and, it seems, many of us are not up to the task. As of Feb. 13, some 120,000 ballots had been received at the Department of Elections for today’s special election. That’s about 24 percent of all registered voters. One day prior to the September, 2021, gubernatorial recall, more than twice as many ballots had been received: around 242,000. 

So today’s  Assembly vote and the fate of school board commissioners Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga will be decided by a small sliver of the population (as will the fate of appointed assessor-recorder, Joaquín Torres, but he’s running essentially unopposed and should do just fine).  

Here’s what to expect today and how to piece together the results. Check back frequently today, for on-the-ground reporting from Eleni Balakrishnan, Lydia Chavez, Annika Hom and Yujie Zhou, political reporting and analysis from Joe Eskenazi and data and graphics from Will Jarrett.

Assembly District 17

So, this is complicated. Even some of the shot-callers who are running these Assembly campaigns were unable to explain the permutation of how we’ll be voting in February, April, June and November. Or who will be voting: Between April and June, the boundary lines change for Assembly District 17, altering the demographics of the constituency and making predictions all the more difficult. 

It didn’t have to be this complicated. Mayor London Breed could’ve waited until later to appoint Assemblyman David Chiu to the vacant City Attorney position. But she didn’t. So it’s complicated. 

Here’s what happens today: If neither David Campos, Matt Haney, Bilal Mahmood nor Thea Selby receives a majority of the vote, we’ll vote again in an April runoff in a contest between the top-two finishers. 

The winner of that April election earns the reward of finishing out the last few months of Chiu’s term, and the not-trifling mantle of incumbency. But here’s where things get even more complicated. 

The incumbent must now defend their victory in June, in a district with different boundaries and voters than the one that elected him or her. And he must do so against a field of challengers that could look very much like today’s: Candidates must declare by March if they intend to run in June. And then we’ll vote for June’s top-two finishers one final time, in November.

Here’s how all of that might shake out: Campos and Haney are the favorites in this race, and it’s a likely bet they’ll go 1-2 and face off again in April. Insiders and knowledgeable observers predicted a “coinflip” finish for Campos and Haney, with both polling in the mid-30s percentage-wise, plus or minus five points. 

If that comes to pass, expect a vituperative campaign in April. Expect Haney to be tied to the fetid conditions in the Tenderloin, where he serves as district supervisor, and expect Campos to be portrayed as the anti-housing zealot behind the proposed moratorium in the Mission, a neighborhood with issues of its own. Expect his ties to Chesa Boudin and, possibly, even Ross Mirkarimi, to be exhumed. Expect well-funded independent-expenditure committees, and another low-turnout, off-season election. 

Haney’s campaign will be keenly watching today to see how many votes 34-year-old first-time candidate Bilal Mahmood receives. The conventional wisdom is that the vast majority of these voters will shift over to Haney in April. Even if Campos were to come out on top today, the historical precedent is challenging for him: In 2016, Jane Kim topped Scott Wiener in the state senate primary. But Republican voters (and a bare-knuckled, multi-million dollar campaign) helped Wiener win in the general election. 

That could happen again in April. Or maybe not: It’s all about who bothers to show up to vote, and April’s voters won’t be racing to the polls fueled by their disdain for the politically toxic Board of Education (more on that in a moment). 

But even if Mahmood finishes out of the money today, we may not have seen the last of the newcomer. That’s because he could file by next month to run again in June. Mahmood is independently wealthy and largely self-funded. He picked up the Chronicle endorsement and, if he has a good showing today, could convince him to give it another shot. As could the new district lines in June, which political observers feel has rendered the district more moderate — a plus for Mahmood.  

(That Chronicle endorsement, meanwhile, was curious; not so much that the paper backed Mahmood, but that it did so in an editorial that did not have his name in the headline, did not urge voters to choose him until midway through the article, and did not run until many, if not most, of the votes in this low-turnout election had already been cast. If, as expected, Campos and Haney clear today’s primary, the paper will all but certainly endorse Haney, which could lead to a truly amazing editorial decision on what to do if Haney wins in April and Mahmood runs again in June. Apropos of nothing, the Chronicle endorsed Amy Kloubuchar for president in 2020).

It’s also quite possible that, presuming Campos and Haney face off in April, the loser will be running again in June (they’ll have to file for that June election by March, which, of course, predates the April runoff).

It’s complicated and costly and exhausting, but this much is certain: You’ll be voting on all this and more in 2022, San Francisco’s year of never-ending voting. 

The Board of Education recall

Today’s recall election of three Board of Education members has become a national story. Supporters of embattled commissioners Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga and Gabriela López point to the gaudy 22-to-1 ratio of money supporting the ouster of the three elected officials compared to the dollars raised to stave off those efforts, and the presumed political agendas of the billionaire donors who’d hand Mayor London Breed three commission appointments and de facto control of the school board.  

Recall backers point to the school board’s flailing performance during the pandemic, its questionable priorities, its violations of open meeting laws while dismantling Lowell High School’s merit-based system and the objectionable behavior of Collins in particular. She not only failed to apologize for years-old Tweets about anti-Black attitudes among Asians that many Asian Americans said played into objectionable and even racist tropes, but followed up with a surreal $87 million lawsuit against the school district and her fellow Board of Education members.

Recall backers and proponents seem unable to conceive that all of these issues can be valid simultaneously. 

Regardless, it’s difficult to foresee any of the three commissioners surviving today’s vote. The possibility of Collins’ objectionable behavior serving as a catalyst for the nascent recall movement and handing control of the Board of Education to the mayor was foreseen by left-leaning city politicos, which explains the near-unanimity of current and former elected officials calling for her resignation. That didn’t happen, and here we are.  

Incidentally, thanks to recall election maven Joshua Spivak, we know that San Francisco is actually quite the outlier in qualifying its school board election; last year, of the gaudy and headline-grabbing 250 nationwide attempts to recall school board members, only 18 made the ballot. But, if San Francisco voters boot the trio, that would actually be par for the course: Spivak notes that, going back to 2011, 25 of 31 school board members whose recall elections made the ballot lost their jobs.

The Department of Elections has a month to certify today’s election results. Should the commissioners be voted out, they have a bit over a week to officially step down, following which the mayor appoints their replacements. The next vote for the Board of Education is in November, when the terms of Collins, Moliga and López were set to expire. 

Mission Local’s reporters are traversing the city today to bring you the stories of Election Day. Check back often for updates. 

The first batch of results will be released at around 8:45 p.m., with more coming on one-hour intervals. Onward. —Joe Eskenazi

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