By Steven T. Jones

San Francisco's pollsters, analysts, and pundits have long enjoyed the postelection ritual of crunching numbers and drawing conclusions, but this year's premiere of ranked-choice voting (RCV) has given the political class more data to slice and dice than ever.

Pollster David Binder told the Bay Guardian the biggest surprise in the data he analyzed was how often incumbent supervisors Gerardo Sandoval and Jake McGoldrick – who were seen as vulnerable going in and then hit hard by negative campaigning – showed up as voters' second or third choices. That secondary support, in addition to their core supporters, put them over the top.

"Despite their negatives, they were seen as safer choices than their challengers," he said.

Political analyst David Latterman discovered that McGoldrick seemed to have broader support than challenger Lillian Sing, who tried to run as someone palatable to all political perspectives.

"McGoldrick, despite active campaigning against him by several moderate candidates and a robust independent expenditure effort, is on 11 of the top 12 more frequent slates," Latterman wrote in an analysis posted on the Usual Suspects Web site (www.sfusualsuspects.com).

His data shows that Sing and McGoldrick were each ranked number one in three of the top six sets of groupings. Yet while McGoldrick was the second or third pick on each of the slates led by Sing, she didn't appear on any of the slates he led.

The most common slate in that district, selected by 5.8 percent of voters, had McGoldrick first, Sing second, and Matt Tuchow third. Yet even though the huge field of 22 candidates in District 5 yielded many more possible slates, a full 9 percent of voters there ranked Ross Mirkarimi first, Robert Haaland second, and Lisa Feldstein third – by far the most common slate in any supervisorial race.

Latterman attributed that largely to the Bay Guardian endorsing those three candidates in that order, which is also how they finished in the most recent results available at press time. (Note: Latterman used data available Nov. 5, before Feldstein had moved from fourth place to third, so the final percentage of voters who used the Guardian slate will probably rise higher.)

"Due to the overwhelming number of candidates, the SFBG slate probably meant more than usual for this election," Latterman concluded. In fact, six of the top nine slates were various combinations of Mirkarimi, Haaland, and Feldstein. The second most common slate in District 5 – selected by 2.2 percent of voters – was Haaland, Dan Kalb, and Bill Barnes, which the city's Democratic County Central Committee endorsed.

Caleb Kleppner of the Center for Voting and Democracy also noted the impact of endorsements, although he looked at it slightly differently. He found that an astounding 26.5 percent of ballots that listed Mirkarimi first listed Haaland second and Feldstein third. He found that 12.5 percent of Haaland voters followed the Democratic Party slate, and that in District 1, 10 percent of McGoldrick voters followed the Democratic slate and named Sing second and Tuchow third.

Gauging how voters liked RCV, the Chinese American Voters Education Committee Nov. 10 released exit polling data (based on a poll conducted by the firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maulin, and Associates), which executive director David Lee told reporters confirmed his long-standing charge that Chinese-speaking voters would be confused by RCV, a system whose scheduled implementation last year he tried to stop with a lawsuit (see "Who's Fighting Election Reform?," 7/2/03).

CAVEC's polling data showed that 39 percent of Chinese-speaking voters found RCV difficult to use – a far higher percentage than for other groups – something Ben Tulchin, a spokesperson for the firm that conducted the poll, called "a significant finding" yet an inconclusive one that warrants more study.

Tulchin and Lee also touted their finding that 49 percent of voters overall said they liked RCV, compared with 20 percent who disliked it and 31 percent who had no opinion. Tulchin said an incumbent politician who posted those kinds of numbers would be considered vulnerable in the next election. Lee, whose group is largely funded by downtown, has made no secret of wanting to overturn RCV. (We called Lee for comment, but he had Tulchin respond.)

But RCV proponent Steven Hill, of the Center for Voting and Democracy, slammed CAVEC's interpretation of the polling numbers, issuing his own press release reinterpreting the numbers and trumpeting, "Poll Shows San Francisco Voters Like Ranked Choice Voting and Find It Easy to Use."

Tulchin accused Hill of having a "biased perspective" but agreed that his interpretation is reasonable and that few voters voiced concerns about RCV. "Some of the numbers we offered are absolutely good news for RCV supporters," he told us.

Nonetheless, San Francisco media outlets ran with the Chinese voter angle, leaving RCV supporters braced to defend the system. Supervisor-elect Mirkarimi used the opportunity to call for the Board of Supervisors to use an RCV system when it elects the new board president in January.

Explaining his reasoning, he told us, "I'm going to be a staunch defender of [RCV], and that's why I put it out there that way."

E-mail Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com.