Just like Ron Chun dreamed it would be -- His Highness Gavin triumphantly hands Phil Ting the coveted assessor/recorder scepter! Ting was the only one who had to go through the RCV wringer this go-around -- but since Ting got about 47% of the vote the first go-around, second-place Sandoval (with 37%) would have had to have gotten 77% of the second-place choices of the Ron Chun voters to take that ermine cape. (We hope it was faux-ermine, at least!)

The RCV tallies are starting to come in now, and though it's not official, Ting wins it with 56% of the adjusted total. We did a little math on the numbers and it looks like Ting got twice as many of Chun's second-place votes as Sandoval did.

The political statistician on call at SF Usual Suspects, David Latterman, has put together an interesting (but .pdf) preliminary report about the assessor/recorder election, which hypothesizes: voters still have a hard time with RCV, Ting did very well in the Castro and Noe Valley (which is attributed to King Gavin The Ambivalent's influence), Sandoval didn't do as well with the progressives as everyone thought he would (hand-wringing), and RCV seems to help moderates more than the left-wingers who got it instituted in the first place. Also: pretty maps.