Lee to become S.F.’s first elected Asian American mayor

With a little more than 32,000 votes left to count, it’s all but certain: Ed Lee will stay on as mayor of San Francisco.

When the ranked-choice votes were tallied on the 150,000-plus ballots counted so far in the mayor’s race, Lee ended up with about 61 percent of the vote after 11 rounds of assigning second- and third-place votes from other candidates.

Supervisor John Avalos finished second, with 39 percent of the vote.

This year’s race field of 16 candidates featured six Asian American candidates — five of whom were elected officials. In addition to Interim Mayor Lee, those Asian American elected officials in the running included Public Defender Jeff Adachi, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, state Sen. Leland Yee and Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting.

Department of Elections director John Arntz said about 25,000 vote-by-mail ballots have yet to be counted, as well as about 7,500 provisional ballots. He expects that those votes will be counted by the end of the weekend.

The Nichi Bei Weekly contributed to this report.

Election Results Before Ranked-Choice Voting
Candidate    Votes    Pct.
Ed Lee    48,767    31.51
John Avalos    28,307    18.29
Dennis Herrera    17,455    11.28
David Chiu    13,990    9.04
Leland Yee    11,745    7.59
Jeff Adachi    9,989    6.45
Bevan Dufty    7,261    4.69
Tony Hall    5,712    3.69
Michela Alioto-Pier    5,524    3.57
Joanna Rees    2,512    1.62
Terry Joan Baum    1,292    0.83
Phil Ting    804    0.52