San Francisco Mayoral Race 2011

Ed Lee won the San Francisco mayoral race, according to preliminary election results released Wednesday, becoming the first Chinese-American elected to the city's top office.

Lee won in the final round of the ranked-choice voting tabulation, with 61 percent of the remaining ballots. Supervisor John Avalos came in second with 38.8 percent. The Bay Citizen has compiled the preliminary results below using our exclusive ranked-choice voting simulator.

In ranked-choice elections, if no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The second choices of the voters who selected that candidate as their first choice are distributed to other candidates. This process continues until one candidate has a majority. That candidate wins. If all of a voter’s chosen candidates are eliminated, his or her ballot is considered “exhausted”and will not be counted in the final tally.

Because the Department of Elections sometimes eliminates multiple candidates at once, The Bay Citizen's simulator shows more rounds than do the official results. However, the outcome is identical.

Click Next below to see how the votes were distributed round by round.

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Vital Statistics

All Ballots cast	Remaining Ballots	Exhausted Ballots	Undervotes	Overvotes
195,323

Notes:

The count of discarded ballots includes exhausted, undervoted and overvoted ballots.
Ballots are exhausted when all of a voter's chosen candidates are eliminated.
A ballot is considered undervoted if it contains no selections for the race in question. Undervoted ballots are discarded in the first round.
A ballot is considered overvoted if more than one candidate is selected for a given choice. Overvoted ballots are discarded in the round when the duplicate selection is discovered.