See update at end.
San Francisco may (or may not) have dodged a bullet in its District Attorney election. California has largely avoided the wave of pro-criminal prosecutors being elected in a number of other cities thanks largely to California's system of non-partisan local elections. Elsewhere, the left-fringe candidates have won by winning the Democratic primary with a Soros-funded war chest in cities so heavily Democratic that the general election is a formality.
San Francisco might yet have a different result from the rest of the state, but its unusual ranked-choice system may have saved it from the worst candidate. That does not mean it will get the best, though. After all, it is San Francisco.
California district attorneys are elected by County. Most counties hold their local elections in even-numbered years, but San Francisco holds its in odd years.
San Francisco is also unique in that it is a consolidated "city and county," with a single government serving both the city and county functions. So when the incumbent district attorney departed to go carpetbagging in Los Angeles, the mayor was able to name one of the candidates as interim district attorney, giving her a boost.
KGO ran this story Monday with a rundown on the four candidates. Suzy Loftus is the mayor's favorite and interim district attorney. She has some experience related to law enforcement as a civilian police commissioner and as counsel for the sheriff. That does not make her a law-and-order candidate, though.
Loftus hopes to attract progressive voters by touting her commitment to ending cash bail for criminal suspects, ending the war on drugs and replacing it with a war on inequality and a lack of opportunity and revaluating past sentences to identify people who could be considered as low risks to public safety if released.
Still, Mayor Breed is more reasonable than the far fringe in San Francisco, and I would expect her candidate to be someone that law enforcement could at least work with, not someone like Philadelphia's Larry Krasner.
The two real prosecutors in the race are Leif Dautch and Nancy Tung. Their campaign proposals, described in the story, involve actually prosecuting criminals.
Then there is the defense lawyer in the race.
A career defense attorney, Deputy Public Defender Chesa Boudin is running on a restorative justice platform to become San Francisco's next district attorney. He has defended indigent clients in more than 300 cases, including felonies like attempted murder, shootings, stabbings, kidnappings and auto theft.
Boudin touts his experience having two incarcerated parents for stoking his desire to change the course of crime and punishment. His mother Kathy Boudin and father David Gilbert became involved with the Weather Underground in the 1970s. In 1981, the pair played a key role in the murder of Brinks armed car guard during an armed robbery in a New York City suburb. Two other Weather Underground members, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, then adopted Boudin and raised him as their son.
The Weather Underground, for those of you who are too young to remember and do not know the actual history, was a terrorist organization. Of course, I would not hold it against anyone that his parents were terrorists, but if he has internalized their values that would be a real problem. From what I know so far, it appears that he does indeed hold hard left views.
In ranked-choice voting, voters can mark a first, second, third, and so on choice, up to the number of candidates in the race (though there does not seem to be much point in marking a last choice). If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and that candidate's voters are reallocated to the candidate of their second choice. This goes on through subsequent rounds until a candidate has a majority. Hence, it is sometimes called an "instant runoff."
So how does this work in practice? Here is the count as of 3:28 p.m. Nov. 7. (See update below.) In the first round, Boudin got 33.9% of the first choice votes, Loftus got 31.5%, Tung got 20.1%, and Dautch got 14.5%, or 22,227 votes. In a plurality-winner system, Boudin would have won with barely a third of the vote.
Instead, Dautch was eliminated, and the count proceeded to round two. Of Dautch's voters, 5296 did not mark a second choice. Of the 16,923 of those who did, 7820 voted for Tung, 5217 for Loftus, and about 3886 for Boudin.
For round three, the other real prosecutor is eliminated. Of Tung's 38,758 round two votes, 13,264 ballots have no further choice marked, 14,300 go to Loftus, and 11,087 go to Boudin. Loftus is up 50.33% to 49.67%, a margin of 879 votes.
That could change. Absentee ballots are valid if postmarked, not necessarily delivered, by election day under the California Voting Fraud Facilitation Act, which also legalized vote harvesting, for which people go to jail in other states.
So far, though, the system seems to have worked pretty much as designed. The lion's share of ballots cast by people whose first choice finished third or fourth ended up with a candidate closer to their first choice's view, reducing the chance that a fringe candidate wins because more moderate voters are split.
Update: Sure enough, the November 8 afternoon report has Boudin up 53 votes.
No, there isn't actually a law called the California Voting Fraud Facilitation Act, but the Legislature has been doing its best to ensure that our elections are not honest.