With about 90,000 San Francisco ballots still left to count, labor leader F.X. Crowley remains ahead of Board of Education President Norman Yee by a margin of only 331 votes in the battle for the District 7 supervisorial seat.

It is unclear how many District 7 ballots are left to be counted, but it’s in the thousands. Department of Elections Director John Arntz said most of those ballots will be counted by Saturday. The 24,000 provisional ballots cast by people whose names didn’t appear on city voter rolls need to be reviewed, and won’t be counted until Tuesday at the earliest.

The City’s other contested supervisorial races appear over, however, with London Breed besting incumbent Supervisor Christina Olague in District 5.

On Wednesday, both Breed and Crowley credited their neighborhood roots as the reason why they emerged as top vote-getters. Crowley and his wife, Nancy, sat outside the Department of Elections on Wednesday afternoon appearing upbeat. He said he was “cautiously optimistic” about winning.

Meanwhile, in District 5, Olague has apparently become the first incumbent to fall in district elections under ranked-choice voting, failing to capitalize on the formidable power of incumbency.

Breed ran a strong campaign, engaging voters with her charisma and compelling life story of having grown up in public housing in her district. Progressives sought to cast her as too moderate for the left-leaning district, and when soft money from real estate investors and developers benefited Breed, progressives attempted to use that against her. But her campaign used strong political mailers to reassure voters that she backed rent control and lived in a rent-controlled apartment.

“They have labeled me this moderate and not looked deeper inside,” Breed said Wednesday.

She said her first order of business as supervisor would be to improve the one-stop job shop in the Western Addition to help more people obtain jobs, she said.

Ted Loewenberg, president of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association President and a Breed backer, said he thought the “race would have been closer” had Olague not been one of four board members to defeat Mayor Ed Lee’s effort to oust Ross Mirkarimi from his post as sheriff after a domestic violence incident.  

Loewenberg said the election shows that District 5, which includes the Haight, Western Addition and Fillmore neighborhoods, is “not this ultra-liberal progressive bastion in the city.” Instead he said it is “more and more a moderate base of homeowners saddled by various burdens of city government and want relief.”

Steven Hill, known as the architect of ranked-choice voting, said a progressive would have likely prevailed in District 5 if there had been more unity among progressive candidates such as  Olague, Julian Davis and John Rizzo.

“No one played a unifying role,” Hill said. “Ranked-choice voting is not a miracle worker.”

jsabatini@sfexaminer.com

How the votes were tabulated                

The outcomes of the District 5 and District 7 supervisorial races will depend upon how voters’ second- and third-choice selections were redistributed after their first selections were disqualified under The City’s ranked-choice voting system.

District 7

District 5