Election workers in San Francisco were busy Wednesday processing votes that will determine who will become the city’s next mayor.
As of Wednesday evening, the San Francisco Department of Elections had processed more than 200,000 ballots.
Preliminary results show Daniel Lurie as the frontrunner and Mayor London Breed in second place.
However, John Arntz, San Francisco’s elections director, cautions that these are preliminary results and that 157,000 ballots remain to be counted, which will likely take the department weeks.
“These are not final results. The ministry does not indicate or imply that these are final results. So any numbers that people see in these preliminary results reports will change,” he said. “These are just snapshots. These snapshots will change over time.”
Arntz said neither he nor the department will declare a winner until he announces the results around Dec. 3. As for why there isn’t an end result yet, he said it’s a matter of volume.
“It’s not a matter of ranked choice voting, it’s a matter of volume – the number of ballots we have to process. Each ballot requires individual attention,” he said. “If I approve the election around December 3, we will issue a ranked choice report. That is the end result. Then the ranked choice matters.”
With the preliminary snapshot first becoming clear on election night, Lurie and his campaign were energetic and optimistic.
“It will take several days for the San Francisco election to be resolved. But we don’t need to know the end results to know what this city means to us,” he said. “We launched this campaign thirteen months ago because we strongly believe it is time for responsible leadership at City Hall.”
Even though the first preliminary results showed her trailing Lurie, Breed maintained confidence and hope on election night.
“In 2018, there were only a few days of counting of votes, the counting of votes went in many different ways. And again I won by 2,500 votes. So I want to be very clear: this is not over until the last vote is counted” , she said.
James Taylor, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, said that while things look promising for Lurie right now, it’s not a done deal yet.
“Usually it takes a few rounds and some time before we know exactly the result,” he said. ‘The counting hasn’t stopped. If you have 150,000 votes, it can bring his back down and hers up.”
However, he said Lurie has the upper hand.
“I’d rather be in Lurie’s camp now than in London Breed’s,” he said. “If I was on the London Breed board I would tell her to brace herself. If I were on the Lurie council I would say you’ve done a good job, let’s hope it continues.”
The next round of preliminary results will be released around 4 p.m. on Thursday, November 7, when the department will begin issuing daily preliminary results reports.
