Matt Smith/The Bay Citizen

District Attorney George Gascon on election night, Nov. 8, 2011

Wednesday at 4 p.m. — that's when there will be some clarity in the races for San Francisco district attorney and sheriff.

On Tuesday night, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi was leading a very close race for sheriff. With all precincts reporting, Mirkarimi had 38 percent of first-choice votes, while his rival Chris Cunnie, an advisor to state Attorney General Kamala Harris, had 28 percent, and Paul Miyamoto, a sheriff's captain, had 27 percent.

In the district attorney's race, George Gascón had nearly twice the share of first-choice votes as his nearest rival, but on Tuesday night, he acknowledged the election remained too close to call.

“I will not attempt to predict the results of the race until I hear official numbers,” said Gascón, who led with 42 percent of first-place votes, followed by UC Berkeley criminal justice scholar David Onek, with 23 percent, and Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Sharmin Bock at 21 percent.

The city's Department of Elections will run its first ranked-choice tabulation Wednesday afternoon.

Under San Francisco’s system of ranked-choice voting, voters choose their first-, second-, and third-choice candidates. If any of them receive more than half of the first-choice votes, that person wins straight away. Lacking such a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped from the tally, and the second choices of voters who picked that candidate are then distributed to other candidates. This cycle of dropping candidates and redistributing votes churns until a single candidate earns a majority, and wins.

At his election night party at the Delancey Street Foundation, Gascón scoffed at critics who questioned his lack of experience. Though he has a law degree, when he was appointed DA in January, after serving as San Francisco's police chief, Gascón had not tried a criminal case.

“When I was appointed by Gavin Newsom in January, I got a lot of naysayers,” he said. “They said, 'How is it possible for him to be balanced, to be fair?' Some even seemed to ask, ‘Does he even have the intellectual capacity to run the DA’s office?’ I’m a dumb cop, after all. But we now have an opportunity to take the criminal justice system to a place it has not been before.”

Gascón compared his unprecedented move from police chief to district attorney to NASA’s Apollo Program.

“They said you can’t go from being police chief to district attorney, because it hasn’t been done before,” he said to supporters. “But that’s what they said before man walked on the moon.”