Eric Mar wins District 1 election in close contest

by Karen M. Kinney

Long-time Richmond District resident Eric Mar has been declared the winner of the District 1 supervisorial election. He beat neighborhood activist Sue Lee by the slimest of margins: by just more than 300 votes out of 25,000-plus cast.

The Nov. 5 SF Board of Supervisors election used the ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank their first, second and third choices for supervisor. The system was created to eliminate the need for costly runoff elections. After eliminating and redistributing votes of candidates not in the majority, the first candidate to exceed 50 percent of the "continuing ballots" is proclaimed the winner.

According to Steven Hill, director of the Political Reform Program for New America Foundation, at any point in the tabulations when the vote totals of two or more candidates do not equal the vote totals of the candidate immediately above them, those candidates have no mathematical chance and can be eliminated at the same time. The order of elimination does not matter.

In District 1 there were nine candidates and seven were eliminated in the first pass, compared to District 3, which had seven passes. However, the District 1 supervisors race was by far the closest one in the City.

After the first round of voting, Mar received 11,638 votes which, according to the SF Department of Elections' Preliminary Rank Choice Voting Report (RCV), is 40.5 percent of the continuing ballots. Lee had about 34 percent with 9,748 votes. The other seven candidates were mathematically eliminated, including Alicia Wang, whom Lee built a coalition with in order to secure Wang's second ranked votes. If Wang had pulled in more votes, she would have gotten the benefit of the second or third place votes cast by Lee supporters. The strategy worked because Lee won two-thirds of all second or third votes from all but one of the seven candidates who were eliminated.

Of the votes Lee picked up, the largest chunk came from Wang, whose supporters contributed some 2,300 votes when the second and third place votes were counted.

Lee was able to chip away at Mar's early vote lead by getting more than 3,000 additional votes. But Mar was able to win by getting 1,503 votes from voters' second and third choices.

After all the votes were counted, Lee brought her total to 12793 votes, or 49.33 percent, but Mar had 13,141 votes, or 50.67 percent, which is more than the 50-percent threshold needed to win.

The winner was determined by the number of valid votes cast only for the top two rivals, so many votes cast for other candidates did not count. With the second and third vote choices breaking for Lee at two-to-one, she could have won if less than another 1,000 votes had counted.

The winning percentages are based only on the 25,934 continuing ballots, not the total number of ballots cast. Of the 31,660 total ballots cast in District 1, there were almost 6,000 (more than 18 percent) that did not count for a number of reasons.

There were 2,691 under votes, which means a person did not vote for any supervisor candidate at all. Then there were 2,778 exhausted votes, or non-transferrable votes, which means a person did not vote for Lee or Mar with any of their three choices. Additionally, 257 people chose more than one candidate in the same column, which causes a problem with the voting machine because it cannot tell the intent of the voter.

Mar won by getting strong support from voters who made him their first choice. As the progressive candidate on the ballot, he got a lot of support from tenants and organized labor.

Lee used ranked-choice voting to her advantage, but she could not overcome Mar's lead.

"If there was a rank-choice award for the best use of the system, Sue Lee would get it hands down," said Hill. "Considering she was going up against a powerful opponent she was able to keep it close."