San Francisco Chronicle

Breed widens lead in S.F. race

- By Dominic Fracassa

San Francisco Supervisor London Breed increased her lead over former state Sen. Mark Leno in the race for mayor Tuesday, and the updated vote totals show that Leno has little chance of catching her.

Breed leads Leno by 1,861 votes — 111,446 to 109,585 or 50.42 to 49.58 percent. There are about 9,390 ballots still to be counted, according to the city’s Department of Elections.

The outcome of the race hinges on the roughly 6,700 provisiona­l ballots left to process, now that most of the vote-by-mail ballots have been accounted for. Provisiona­l ballots are given to people who want to cast ballots but don’t appear on official voter registrati­on lists.

Assuming Leno would need to gain 1,900 votes to reclaim the lead, Breed would have “to collapse to 20 percent of firstplace votes on the 6,700 provisiona­ls. That is all but impossible,” said Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. Breed has only added to her first-place totals since election night. On Tuesday, the most recent tally showed her leading by a mar-

“We’re going to be waiting until each and every vote is counted.” Zoë Kleinfeld,

Leno campaign spokeswoma­n

gin of nearly 12 percentage points in terms of first-place votes: 36.56 percent to Leno’s 24.66 percent.

Determinin­g whether the provisiona­l ballots are valid is a labor- and time-intensive process, but around 90 percent of provisiona­l ballots processed so far have been accepted, according to John Arntz, director of the Elections Department.

The narrow lead Leno establishe­d on election night evaporated on Saturday, when Breed pulled ahead by 498 votes. She has widened that lead with each passing day, providing an encouragin­g signal to her supporters as the tense waiting game to decide the city’s next chief executive continues. Leno trailed by 1,601 votes following Monday’s update from the Department of Elections.

Breed has held fast to a healthy lead of firstplace votes throughout the week, a sign of her broad popularity across the city. By contrast, Leno has relied on the huge number of secondchoi­ce votes he received from supporters of Supervisor Jane Kim. Kim and Leno endorsed each other as their No. 2 picks on the city’s rankedchoi­ce ballot.

Breed’s campaign didn’t claim victory after Tuesday’s results, and the Leno camp didn’t concede.

“It’s still just too early to call,” Breed campaign spokeswoma­n Tara Moriarty said.

Leno is expected to hold a news conference Thursday to address the state of his campaign. If current vote-counting trends continue, the winner of the election should be clear by then.

“We’re going to be waiting until each and every vote is counted,” said Zoë Kleinfeld, a spokeswoma­n for the Leno campaign.

Tallying mail votes is a long process in San Francisco because each ballot is split into four separate cards, each of which has to be removed from a sealed envelope and hand-fed into one of the city’s four vote-counting machines. The city has 478,113 registered voters, around 50 percent of whom are estimated to have turned out for the June 5 election.

A winner won’t be officially declared until Arntz certifies the election after ensuring that all valid ballot cards for every local, state and federal race have been counted. His certificat­ion then has to be approved by the Board of Supervisor­s.

Because of that, the winning mayoral candidate might not be sworn in until early July.

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