Analysis of Ranked-Choice Voting: SF D.A. 2011

The bulk of the media attention to last week's local election in San Francisco has been directed at the mayoral race — the first competitive contest under both public financing and ranked-choice voting (RCV). However, digging a bit beneath the surface of the election of the District Attorney sheds some light on how RCV played out. I was able to download the entirety of the ballots from a public website. To be clear, I cannot tell how a specific person voted; however, I can tell you exactly how many people voted for Bill Fazio in 1st place, George Gascón in 2nd place, and David Onek in 3rd place: 1,055. I can also tell you that the progressives who supported the ticket of Onek–Bock–Fazio (recommended by the San Francisco Bay Guardian/sfbg.com and others) had the unintended effect of helping George Gascón to an easy win. Although she was the second choice of the "anybody but Gascón" crowd, Sharmin Bock's core supporters clearly were not fully on board with the concept.

An important caveat is that the data I downloaded were preliminary results, and do not include the last 2,603 ballots (1.39%) to be processed.

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