In San Francisco, there's all-out battle for the mayor's office, and tech leaders are pouring money into the race. Eight candidates are vying in Tuesday's special election, which resulted from the sudden death in December of 65-year-old Mayor Ed Lee, who had deep ties with the tech community. Most of the heavy-hitters in tech are supporting candidate London Breed, with some supporting Jane Kim. Donors include Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who has donated $100,500 to committees supporting Breed. Venture capitalist Ron Conway and his wife, Gayle, have also contributed toward a Breed victory; Gayle Conway spent $200,000 on a committee against Kim. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen donated $49,000 to a committee backing Breed. Facebook gave $35,000 to a committee supporting Breed. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of the late CEO Steve Jobs and founder of the Emerson Collective, have donated $500 each to Breed's campaign. Kim has tech backers as well. The CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, and Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane have donated $100,000 and $50,000, respectively, to a committee supporting Kim. The winner of the special election will serve through 2020. During his tenure, Lee oversaw a temporary tax break — often dubbed the "Twitter tax break" — that provided incentives for companies to move into buildings in San Francisco's mid-Market neighborhood. The break was especially beneficial for pre-IPO tech companies, as it exempted them from paying potentially expensive payroll taxes on the value of employees' vested stock options. Since then, many tech companies established or expanded their presence in the neighborhood, including Twitter, Spotify, Uber and Zendesk. Other big tech companies expanded their presence in San Francisco during Lee's mayorship, including Pinterest, Dropbox, Airbnb, Yelp and Square. Salesforce also expanded its presence in San Francisco, building the soaring Salesforce Tower, which is now the tallest building in the city. Lee's mayorship also coincided with a backlash against the tech industry in San Francisco. Critics argue the infusion of highly paid tech engineers has led to the city's housing crisis, congestion and the rise of homelessness — all of which are top issues in the mayoral race.<doc-sep>SAN FRANCISCO — The City by the Bay could make history by electing its first African-American woman, Asian-American woman or openly gay man for mayor in a contest added to Tuesday's ballot after the unexpected death of Mayor Ed Lee in December. The leading candidates are London Breed, the African-American president of the Board of Supervisors who briefly served as interim mayor after Lee's death; Jane Kim, a San Francisco supervisor and daughter of Korean immigrants; and former state Sen. Mark Leno, who entered the mayor's race long before Lee's death, and who championed gay marriage statewide. It is the city's first competitive mayoral race in 15 years, and one without an incumbent. All three are Democrats, but Breed is backed by the establishment business community while Leno and Kim are favored by more liberal elements of the Democratic Party, including tenants and critics of tech companies such as Airbnb and Uber. The city has enormous wealth thanks to a flourishing economy led by the tech industry, but it's also plagued by rampant homelessness and deep pockets of poverty. A fourth candidate, Angela Alioto, served as a supervisor in the late 1980s and 1990s and her father, Joe, was mayor from 1968 to 1976. San Francisco uses a ranked-choice voting system. Voters rank their top-three candidates in order of preference. The candidates with the least votes are eliminated in rounds until there's a winner. How Ranked-Choice Voting Works Roque Ruiz John Artnz, the director of the Department of Elections in San Francisco, says a winner might not be known until Friday, which is also the state deadline for counties to receive ballots postmarked by June 5. "If it's very, very, very tight it might come down to every single ballot card," Artnz said. In 2010, Jean Quan became the mayor of nearby Oakland when she scored enough second- and third-place votes to beat the candidate with the most first-place votes. In this race, Kim and Leno are deploying a similar tactic and have asked supporters to vote for the other as their No. 2 choice on the ballot. The other candidates are Michelle Bravo, a massage therapist; Amy Farah Weiss, a homelessness activist; Republican businessman Richie Greenberg; and Ellen Lee Zhou, a public health worker who opposed recreational marijuana legalization.<doc-sep>London Breed won more votes than any other candidate in Tuesday’s race to become San Francisco’s next mayor, but the city’s unusual way of electing its leaders means Breed now trails her second-place rival. Since 2004, San Francisco voters have cast ranked-choice ballots, designating a favorite candidate, a second choice and a third choice. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the lowest vote-getter is removed, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on voters’ second choice. The process is repeated until one contender receives more than half the vote. The system had never been used in an open mayor’s race, until this year, when voters picked a replacement for the late Mayor Ed Lee, who died in 2017. Supporters of ranked-choice voting say it saves money by eliminating the need for runoff elections. San Francisco estimates a city-wide runoff would cost local government about $3.7 million. It may also inspire candidates to be nicer to each other — former state Sen. Mark Leno (D), who leads Tuesday’s election by a narrow margin, struck a deal with San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim in which they asked their voters to pick each other as their second-place option. “When you’re vying for the second choice votes of other candidates, you have an incentive to be more collaborative and civil to each other,” said Pedro Hernandez, deputy director of FairVote California, a group that backs ranked-choice voting. That deal between Leno and Kim paid off. Breed, the president of the county Board of Supervisors, received about 36 percent of the first-choice votes, compared with 26 percent for Leno and 23 percent for Kim. After nine rounds of tallying, in which candidates with fewer votes were eliminated, Leno held a tiny lead of about 1,100 votes over Breed. Kim’s voters ranked Leno higher than Breed by more than a three-to-one margin, according to the city’s elections bureau. Breed’s chances aren’t dead yet. The San Francisco Department of Elections said it has about 90,000 ballots left to count. In a statement posted on Facebook, Breed said the race is still too close to call. “We likely will not know the result for several days but I will be sure to keep you updated as we learn more,” Breed wrote to supporters. Cities in eight states use ranked-choice voting to elect local officials. This year, Maine will become the first state to nominate both statewide and federal candidates through ranked-choice voting. Six states, mostly in the South, use ranked-choice voting for members of the military and overseas voters. Hernandez said ranked-choice voting also means that more voters get a final say in the electoral process. Before implementing the ranked-choice system, San Francisco’s runoff elections typically attracted much smaller electorates than the initial round. But under the ranked-choice system, nearly 90 percent of the 156,000 voters who cast a ballot included either Breed or Leno among their top three choices. “Asking voters to come out twice, it’s a lot of work,” Hernandez said. “People wanted elections to be more substantive. They wanted less negative campaigning, and they wanted to maximize turnout.”<doc-sep>EMBED >More News Videos San Francisco has been using ranked-choice voting since 2004. Here's how it works. SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- It's been five days since Election Day and we still don't know who will be San Francisco's next mayor. But workers at City Hall are making sure every vote is counted in this very tight race.The weekend started with Mark Leno leading the race for mayor, but after tens of thousands of ballots were processed Saturday and Sunday, London Breed pulled ahead.Through rank choice voting, both Leno and Breed have more than 100,000 votes, but Breed is now ahead of Leno by more than 1,500. "We haven't seen the votes this close since I've been here," said Director of SF's Department of Elections, John Arntz. He's been director for 16 years.Arntz says they'll spend the rest of the week counting the remaining 26,000 ballots. "We're not stressed out, we're not sweating," he said. "This is our process, every election, this is what we do and we seek to have every vote count no matter what the contest is, no matter who the candidates are. "During elections, the Department of Elections turns the ground floor of City Hall into a vote-counting factory. Right now, they are counting provisional ballots.The workers are here from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every single day. On Sunday evening, they're counting ballots that were kicked out of the machine. That might happen, for example, if there's a write-in candidate. And then behind the glass, workers are tabulating actual results. "It's been a roller coaster of emotions. Every time we come down here, we don't know what to expect," said Tara Moriarty, spokesperson for London Breed's campaign. "She's just waiting and watching like the rest of us. She's very excited to see the outcome because I think for a lot of us here in San Francisco, we feel like we're in a state of limbo. "In a statement, Mark Leno said, "It remains to be seen over the next few days, but it's not over yet."<doc-sep>
EMBED >More News Videos San Francisco has been using ranked-choice voting since 2004. Here's how it works. SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- At least for the next several days, the San Francisco Department of Elections will have updated results on the mayoral race 4 p.m. daily. Less than a percentage point separates the top two candidates: Mark Leno with 50.42 percent of the vote and London Breed with 49.58 percent.But the ballots keep coming in. Those postmarked on or before election day are valid as long as they arrive by Friday. "So today we received 13-thousand, almost 13-thousand of such ballots. We checked the postmarks and most of those ballots have good postmarks on them so that's another 13,000 ballots that we didn't have yesterday that we have today," said John Arntz, San Francisco's Director of Elections.San Francisco Department of Elections starts fresh every day, counting the entire batch of ballots all over again.According to the latest count, roughly 75 percent of Jane Kim's voters chose Mark Leno as their second choice, while 25 percent chose Breed -- a difference that's pushing Leno slightly ahead despite Breed having captured the most first-place votes in the first round.No surprise that one day after the election, the candidates have different views on the instant runoff system called ranked choice voting. "This is the one we're dealing with as it relates to this race so, for now, we're stuck with it," said Breed. "It promotes more positive campaigning because if I want your second place votes I'm not going to drop a bomb on you and so I think we saw that in this race as well," said Leno.San Francisco State Professor and Political Analyst Joe Tuman went through ranked choice voting twice as a candidate for Oakland mayor. "It does feel a little bit unfair when you have the most number of first place votes and you end up not winning because you didn't get seconds and thirds, but arguably if you want to be everybody's candidate then you need to get more than 50 percent of the first place votes and never have to deal with ranked choice," said Tuman.But at this point, the race is too close to call -- and is expected to take days if not weeks to determine the winner.