The San Francisco Department of Elections moments ago released the results of another 6,923 ballots, crossing the 400,000-vote plateau. The total of processed ballots is now 403,466: 77.25 percent of the electorate.
Perhaps 9,600 ballots remain. Of these, only 1,100 are vote-by-mail ballots, and 8,500 are provisional ballots cast throughout the city and at City Hall on Election Day. Scrutinizing provisional ballots requires additional time, and not all may be accepted.
If every provisional ballot is accepted — which is not probable — turnout would peak at 79 percent (late-arriving mail ballots have pushed up the potential vote ceiling). That’s still a significant drop from 2020, when 86.3 percent of registered voters cast a ballot.
Let’s dive right into the only two remaining contested races: District 11 supervisor, and the fourth and final open spot on the Board of Education:
In District 11, Chyanne Chen is still leading with 11,957 votes to Michael Lai’s 11,765 — just a 192-vote difference. Lai gained 12 votes compared to yesterday.
While this is a slim margin, there are very few outstanding votes left to count in District 11.
“Most of the provisional ballots for D11 are now reviewed and processed and those votes are included in the preliminary results reports,” Elections Director John Arntz told Mission Local on Thursday. “The remaining provisional ballots are nearly all from districts besides D11.”
With hardly any provisional ballots remaining to be counted in District 11, the only outstanding votes are the 1,100 vote-by-mail ballots. But these hail from all 11 districts.
Chen’s lead continues to be fueled by the district’s third-place finisher, Ernest “EJ” Jones. According to the latest results today, 2,829 of Jones’ votes transferred to Chen and 1,563 went to Lai.
In the Board of Education race, Matt Alexander, the incumbent Board President, is clinging to a slim lead on John Jersin for the fourth and final open seat by 298 votes — 156 fewer than yesterday. Alexander has 121,167 votes, while Jersin is at 120,869 votes after today’s results.
The winner will return to the board with the three top vote-getters: Jaime Huling, Parag Gupta and Supriya Ray, three newcomers who are poised to take office in January.
The next election update is slated for Saturday at 4 p.m.
Upon further consideration, my math was even more crackpot than I wanted it to be and shouldn’t be expressed in those metrics. Still, a 7% 2020 to 2024 turnout drop in SF is more than triple the national average. Harris couldn’t even pull as many votes in SF as did Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The amount of registered voters is nearly identical to 2020. The decline in turnout in 2024 from 2020 is close to 50,000 voters. The decline in votes for the Democratic nominee for president is close to 60,000 votes.
On paper, the Dem Party decline in point spread was about 2.5 points this year (65 point spread in 2024 and 67.5 point spread in 2020). In crackpot theory, when accounting for Dem Party voters who didn’t bother to vote, the point spread decline was well over 10 points, maybe even somewhere around 15 points.
That’s a massive shift, especially considering Harris cut her teeth in SF and that there was no mayoral race in 2020. Can you write a column an theorize what this indicates Joe?
Preserve district supervisor independence or face the Breed/Engardio graft scourge!
May I take a moment to say Thank GOD that Alison Collins and Gabriela Lopez aren’t running for school board again! Lopez actually won the Mission District last time out after being recalled for being incompetent. And Collins is the one who called Asians white supremacists, which, I can’t even. And then she sued the city for hundreds of millions of dollars when the board wouldn’t let her be president.
No matter how mediocre the new board members are, they’re an improvement. It’s almost inconceivable how terrible the board was just 4 years ago.