Watching ranked-preference voting in action

Today was my first time actually voting with San Francisco's instant runoff system, known as ranked-preference voting. Instead of having an election and then having a runoff six weeks later if nobody got an outright majority, voters list their 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd choices for each office.

In one of today's contests, City Attorney, it's a rather inelegant formality: there is only one name, without even any write-in candidates. However, for Assessor-Recorder and Treasurer, we get to give our druthers and our almost druthers and our grumbling mutter-mutters.

It looks something like this:

President of the United States

First Choice			Second Choice			Third Choice
George Washington	←		George Washington			George Washington
Warren G. Harding			Warren G. Harding			Warren G. Harding
Abe Lincoln			Abe Lincoln	←		Abe Lincoln
George W. Bush			George W. Bush			George W. Bush
write-in:			write-in:			write-in: Wavy Gravy	←

The voter immediately in front of me apparently voted for only one candidate in one of the contested races. [I didn't see which office, much less which candidate, so there was no breach of the voter's privacy in my knowing that isolated factoid.] The reason I know is that the ballot machine spat out that particular page, and the poll worker said, "You voted for only one candidate. Is that how you intended to vote?" It was an elegant balance of allowing the voter to abstain in the instant runoff with ensuring that the voter didn't unintentionally mis-mark the new and unfamiliar style of ballot. We don't want any butterfly-ballot scenarios here.

By the way, the only write-in candidate on the ballot didn't even bother to vote for himself, at least if the results on the city's web site are accurate. 2,752 people did write in something for the otherwise uncontested City Attorney race, even though no write-in candidates qualified before the election.

The only race in which the ranked-preference system mattered was the Assessor-Recorder. Oddly, even though the web site reports 100% of the precinct results, it does not officially record the instant run-off result. If even 23% of Ronald Chun's voters had Phil Ting as their second choice, then Ting was re-elected, but if somehow 77.4% of those Chun voters had Gerardo Sandoval as second choice, then Sandoval won a stunning upset. I'm guessing, just on raw odds, that it's Ting, but Chun ran on a strongly anti-Ting platform, so his voters might have been strongly pro-Sandoval as an "anyone but Ting" vote. Could it have been by a more than 3-to-1 margin, though? Official word, apparently, will wait until morning.