SF mayor's race: Leno's lead slips to only 255 votes after Thursday's count
San Francisco’s already close mayor’s race got even tighter Thursday afternoon, with former state Sen. Mark Leno holding on to a tiny lead of just 255 votes over Supervisor London Breed with tens of thousands of ballots still uncounted.
The latest update from the city’s Department of Elections showed Leno on top with 50.09 percent of the votes, compared to Breed’s 49.91 percent. Leno’s lead slipped from 1,121 votes a day earlier.
The elections department had processed 8,065 ballots since releasing its last update on Wednesday. With nearly 84,000 ballots that still need to be processed, the race for the city’s top job remains a toss-up that won’t be decided for days. Another 3,000 vote-by-mail ballots with valid postmarks were dropped off at the elections department on Thursday.
Tara Moriarty, a spokeswoman for the Breed campaign, said the paper-thin vote margins “shows how important it is to make sure that every vote is counted in this election.”
After trailing Breed by around 10 percentage points for most of election night, Leno surged ahead in the early hours of Wednesday morning, thanks to the thousands of second-place place votes he picked up from Jane Kim supporters under San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system.
Thursday’s figures show Breed maintaining a firm grip on first-place votes, which she’s had since initial results began to trickle in on election day. Breed has now 35.89 percent of first-choice votes, compared to Leno’s 25.74 percent.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-mayor-s-race-Leno-s-lead-slips-to-only-12976981.php
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