Monthly Archives: November 2008

There’s not much to update, which is why I haven’t. I’m still in 4th place, 765 votes behind Jill Wynns and 5034 votes ahead of Barbara Lopez. The trend we’ve seen since Election Night is holding. The Examiner has a piece this morning quoting the Elections Dept. as saying it has 5,000 ballots left to count. There are also a lot of provisional ballots left to count, so while it is getting mathematically more difficult for someone to edge me out for a seat, it’s not impossible.

Results are updated each afternoon at around 4 p.m. You can find them here.

. . . It must be true!  From the SFBG politics blog tonight:

With the vast majority of the absentees now counted, it’s safe to call the school board election. Norman Yee was easily re-elected; Sandy Fewer is in second. Third place appears to be incumbent Jill Wynns, with Rachel Norton just a bit behind her. Those will be the four people elected.

Today’s updated election results do indeed show Jill Wynns and I holding steady in third and fourth place, respectively. Elections says there are about 20,000 absentees left to count, and another 16,000 provisional ballots. So while it’s not inconceivable that Barbara Lopez or Jaynry Mak could still come from behind and win a seat, I am starting to breathe a bit easier.

Update: Tim Norton is demanding that I keep the Election Results link up top. I am in third place now.  And Tim Redmond at the Bay Guardian agrees with the S.F. Examiner that this count is going way too slowly.

The Chronicle has a relatively clear explanation of where the count currently stands and why things could change:

As of Wednesday morning, San Francisco’s Department of Elections reported having 136,000 ballots left to count and by Wednesday afternoon workers had counted only about 12,000 of those. Those ballots include both provisional ballots and mail-in and early ballots.

John Arntz, the city’s elections director, said it is unlikely that all those outstanding ballots will be counted until late next week. The reason? The sheer size of the San Francisco ballot, which was three or four cards depending where you live. It takes time to run those through the tabulation machines, which can do a maximum of 80,000 cards a day.

The Examiner is not happy about the slow pace:

With a mind-boggling 36 percent of The City’s ballots not even tallied as of 24 hours after Election Day, the results continue dribbling in daily. Only 4,000 additional ballots were counted on the first day after election, because just one person was available to process ballots Wednesday. And a paltry 12,000 more ballots were counted as of late Thursday afternoon.

Certainly, the Elections Department needed to field all its resources on Election Day to cope with the heavy crowds. But only one person processing mail-in ballots the day after — how is that even conceivable in a major city?

Updated counts are posted every afternoon (I’m not clear on whether they will update the counts over the weekend, but it seems to me it’s the least they could do).  As of Thursday afternoon, Barbara Lopez and I are essentially tied for the last two seats, with Jill Wynns not far behind.

Also, I talked to Natalie the Kindergarten Crusader last night. Since I don’t think five-year-olds grasp “cautiously optimistic,” I kept things straightforward. “It looks good,” I told her. “I’m still ahead.” But like the hard-boiled campaign operative she is, Natalie didn’t sugar-coat it. “But I don’t know if you won,” she responded calmly. Neither do I – but Natalie and I can be proud that we worked hard and ran a good race.