SF Mayoral Race: Lurie leads Breed after first rounds of ranked-choice voting
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Daniel Lurie has a commanding lead over incumbent London Breed in the race for San Francisco mayor as of Wednesday morning, with preliminary numbers in.
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After the first ranked-choice voting calculations, Lurie has 56% of the vote and Breed has 43.6%. Lurie leads Breed by over 24,000 votes and all other candidates have been eliminated. There will be more reports of calculations as the votes come in.
The Department of Elections said on Wednesday that it still has to process and count roughly 157,000 ballots before a final winner can emerge. This includes provisional ballots and absentee ballots received the day before and on Election Day either by mail, drop boxes or polling places.
San Francisco election officials said it could take up to three weeks for finalized results on the mayoral race. Nolan Higdon - a professor of history and media studies at UC Santa Cruz - said ranked choice voting adds another layer of complication in tabulating results.
"Rank choice voting in general takes some time just because of the way in which it's calculated. It's not a straight count. So you add on top of that that folks are mailing in their ballots, and that's definitely going to going to take some lag time," Higdon said.
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"When they calculate the votes, they look at everybody's first pick. If no candidate has more than 50% of the vote, the first pick with the least amount of votes is dropped. And all the votes that were given to that person go to that person's second pick. And that person's second pick now becomes their first pick and they do it again," he said.
Lurie has never held public office. He is the founder of a San Francisco nonprofit and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
He says he is vowing to bring change to San Francisco and make the city a place that residents can be proud of, but he says it won't happen overnight.
Despite no official decision, Lurie posted on X Tuesday night, saying "The campaign is over," and that "it's time for us to roll up our sleeves and work together-no matter the outcome of this election."
Mayor London Breed is holding her ground, telling supporters Tuesday night she's vowing to go the distance. She pointed out that she was not in the lead for several days when she was first elected six years ago. She won that race by just 2,500 votes.
"We need to make sure that we are holding out the hope and the excitement for the future. And that's why all of these people are here today, because we are not giving up," Breed said. "We are not giving up the fight. We love this city."
Both candidates urged everyone to be patient during the vote count.
