Now, SFist and your Political Junkie are not really statisticians, but the preliminary data coming in from the RCV reports compiled by the Center for Voting and Democracy yield some pretty interesting results, as reported by the Examiner's Adriel Hampton. For instance, a full 26.5% percent of the voters (2,596 people) voting for Mirkarimi for first choice voted the Guardian-endorsed slate of Mirkarimi/Haaland/Feldstein. Go Brugmann! And poor Robert Haaland, always a best man but never a groom -- 49.6% of Mirkarimi's support had Haaland listed as the number 2 guy.
In other RCV-related news, there's a small tiff brewing over whether the Chinese-American community understood the new RCV system or not. Critics charge that a large number of Chinese voters only voted for one candidate and that in subsequent surveys, a larger-than-expected number expressed either no opinion or dislike of the new system. The RCV people have some methodological complaints with the critics' studies, which are summarized by Adriel Hampton too (scroll down). (Ah, it reminds us of the heady Mystery Pollster accuracy-of-polling-projections days of three weeks ago.) It seems to our non-professional eyes that Tsai and Sing may have done the traditional split of the Chinese-American vote in District 1, with or without ranked choice voting, but we don't actually know how to read these numbers well enough to figure that out.
Finally, as the numbers start trickling in and the absentee and provisional ballots get counted (scroll down), it turns out turnout in the San Francisco elections was around 72%. (Sorry we wrongly accused you guys of not turning out earlier.) Lisa Feldstein has fought her way back to 3rd place in District 5 (fat lot of good it'll do her, but still), relegating Nick Waugh back to 4th, but Heather Hiles remains trapped in 5th place in the school board race. No word if she's calmed the f*** down enough to concede yet.