The San Francisco Department of Elections moments ago released the results of an additional 17,333 ballots. That brings the grand total of processed ballots to 382,292 — 73.2 percent of the electorate
There are now very few ballots remaining; perhaps 24,700. Of those, 6,700 are late-arriving vote-by-mail ballots, and some 18,000 are provisional ballots cast at citywide polling places (which may or may not ultimately be accepted). Turnout is tracking to be about 77.8 percent, maximum. The average San Francisco turnout in a presidential year, going back 108 years, is 77 percent.
Approximately 43,000 fewer San Franciscans figure to have cast a ballot in 2024 than they did four years ago.
On to the contested Board of Supervisors races:
In District 1, Connie Chan now sits 1,167 votes ahead of Marjan Philhour. While this race was, brain-meltingly, tied on Thursday — 11,001 votes apiece — every subsequent vote drop pushed it further in Chan’s direction.
This result, and margin of victory, caught the city’s political establishment off guard. Chan only beat Philhour by 125 votes in 2020, and 2022 saw conservative precincts grafted onto the district. On its face, the outcome is counterintuitive. But Chan’s campaign felt it would have benefitted four years ago from the in-person, door-knocking campaign it ran in 2024 — but couldn’t during the pandemic.
Labor campaigned heavily on Chan’s behalf in District 1. It does not seem to be a coincidence that Philhour, a former fundraiser and senior adviser to Mayor London Breed, suffered for her ties to the mayor. Breed did not win a single precinct in District 1, and no candidate running for office in this cycle was more closely tied to her than Philhour.
In District 5, incumbent Dean Preston yesterday conceded the race to Bilal Mahmood, though he did not mention Mahmood in his online posting.
After today’s results, Mahmood leads Preston after ranked-choice tabulations by just over 1,400 votes. While most of this cycle’s winning candidates heavily outperformed the competition in first-place votes, the incumbent Preston did not. He only garnered 291 more than Mahmood, and then was swamped by an overwhelming transfer rate from candidates Scotty Jacobs and Autumn Looijen to Mahmood.
The conventional wisdom was that Preston could defend his keep, while Chan was vulnerable, but the opposite turned out to be the case. The assumption that Preston was stronger than he was in District 5, and Philhour was stronger than she was in District 1, may have led third-party groups supporting them to wait too long before entering the fray.
In District 7, Supervisor Myrna Melgar captured nearly 47 percent of first-place votes and holding on to lead a 52.8-47.2 tilt over Matt Boschetto. After ranked-choice voting tabulations, Melgar leads by just over 1,900 votes. Barring unforeseen lunacy, Melgar is your once and future District 7 supervisor, and an unabashed candidate for Board President.
In District 11, Chyanne Chen, on Saturday, caught and passed Michael Lai. On Sunday, she added to her slim lead, growing it from 99 votes to 270 (50.6 percent to 49.4 percent). Today, Lai actually shaved 63 votes off Chen’s lead — he is now only 207 votes down.
With few votes remaining to be counted citywide, it’s not particularly likely this outcome will change, but this is not many votes. Of note: Chen and Ernest “EJ” Jones ran a 1-2 campaign. Of Jones’ 4,239 transferring votes, 2,742 went to Chen and 1,497 went to Lai. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, has made all the difference.
In Districts 3 and 9, Danny Sauter and Jackie Fielder continue to hold nigh-insurmountable leads. District 9 challenger Trevor Chandler yesterday announced that he had called Fielder and conceded his race.
In the Board of Education race, incumbent Board President Matt Alexander finally caught and passed John Jersin for the fourth and final slot. Today’s vote count put Alexander at 116,487 votes to Jersin’s 116,269. That’s a 218-vote difference.
Alexander found himself 5,000 votes down after the earliest Election Day results, but has gained on Jersin in nearly every subsequent count.
Top vote-getters Jaime Huling, Parag Gupta and Supriya Ray will be taking office in January. The school district’s preliminary budget is slated to drop this week, and nobody expects it’ll be good. The district faced serious challenges even before the possibility of federal retribution potentially affecting the already beleaguered budget. Good luck to all four office-holders: We’re all counting on you.
There were 15 ballot measures put before San Francisco voters in this election. We can essentially close the book on them now. The lavishly funded Prop. D is now being rejected by 56.5 percent of the electorate. Its scantly funded countermeasure, Prop. E, will pass: It has 52.3 percent of the vote.
Prop. F, a police pension measure, will fail with 54.8 percent of voters inveighing against it. Prop. H, a fire pension measure, will squeak by with a 51.9 percent approval rate.
Prop. K, the polarizing measure to close portions of the Great Highway, passed with 54.1 percent of the vote, but appears to have cleaved a metaphysical divide in city voters, along with the physical divide of Westsiders spurning it and Eastsiders going for it. Perhaps, this one time, Westside residents wished there were more people living there.
Mayor London Breed conceded the race on Wednesday and Daniel Lurie, on Thursday, claimed victory. After Monday’s ballot drop and ranked-choice voting permutations, Lurie leads by 33,287 votes (55.35 percent to 44.65 percent).
Finally, 80.6 percent of San Franciscans voted for Kamala Harris to 15.3 percent for Donald Trump.
In raw numbers, Trump now has 57,292 votes citywide. In 2020, he had 56,417, and in 2016, he had 37,688. Is he gaining popularity? Yes and no: In 2016, 345,084 San Franciscans voted for Hillary Clinton; in 2020, 378,156 of us voted for Joe Biden.
Eight years ago, 80.7 percent of San Franciscans showed up to vote; four years ago, 86.3 percent did. This year, again, a maximum of 77.8 percent of the city will turn in a ballot. Rather than a statistically insignificant increase in Trump votes, the dampened turnout and relatively low total of votes for the Democratic nominee — who was a former San Francisco elected official — seem more relevant.
Tomorrow is the last day for any ballot postmarked by Election Day to arrive at City Hall and be counted. “Now is the time in the cycle when we have to manually review not only individual returned vote-by-mail and provisional ballots, but also individual cards,” Elections director John Arntz tells us. “This review slows processing.”
In District 11, the last contested supervisorial race, Arntz said it’s not clear how many votes are outstanding. There were around 1,200 provisional votes from District 11 at the start of the process, however, and some of them were counted today.
“We’ll have most of the remaining ballot cards processed and reported this week,” he says.
The next update will come on Tuesday at 4 p.m.
