How'd We Vote, San Francisco?
Well, you'll probably all be as relieved as we were that the proposal to adopt an SF policy to buy back Alcatraz Island from the feds for a billion dollars in order to build a peace center was thoroughly trounced in the polls, losing at a rate of almost 3:1 (72% no). You can continue telling your friends back home that you'll take them on the ferry ride to the prison if they'd ever come out and visit you out here!
We had about 50% turnout (though we can't tell if the Board of Elections is still counting or not), with 75% turnout for registered Democrats (which we think includes all the Decline To States).
On the presidential side, Barack Obama won SF -- but with only 52% of the vote. We really did think that would be much higher! (There's a big however here, though, which is that this count does not include provisionals or absentee ballots turned in on the day of the election.)
More musings on numbers, the SF Republican vote, and the rest of the propositions after the jump.
Statewide, it looks like Obama won SF, Alameda, Marin and a bunch of college counties (including Davis) -- while Clinton took a lot of the other ones, including Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and LA County (though LA did have all those Decline to State problems on the ballot). We're still leafing through the links (Obama won Sonoma and Sacramento?), but here's the general list if you want to poke around it yourself.
On the Republican side, the SF elephants pulled the lever for McCain at 54%, with Romney in second at 22% and Ron Paul in third with 8%. We knew that Ron Paul poster we saw on the 101/80 onramp at South Van Ness was going to make a difference!
And were you even paying attention to the other propositions? We certainly weren't! We got more money for the city parks; our part of the state voted down Indian gaming casinos but it doesn't matter anyways because everyone else wants more slot machines. And, despite our best efforts in Sodom and Gomorrah over here, there's not going to be any bonds for community colleges, and term limits will not be extended for the folks currently in office.
Okay, we gotta run to work now, but some other interesting tidbits we saw in the SF results.
--Cynthia McKinney just edged out Ralph Nader for the SF Green Party presidential pick.
--A guy named Mad Max is running for president on the Independent ticket.
--Only 36 more people voted for Ron Paul than voted for Rudy Giuliani in SF, and Tom Tancredo got 31 votes.
--and... who's the 50,000 people who voted FOR the peace center on Alcatraz? We're dying to know!