‘We are on the right side of history,’ Engardio says after losing recall

Mayor Daniel Lurie issued a statement at 9:20 p.m. thanking Joel Engardio for his “years of service” while telling aggrieved Westside residents that he is listening.

“As I campaigned for mayor last year, I heard countless west side families say what San Franciscans have been feeling for years: that their government is doing things to them, not with them, and that government is not working to make their lives better,” Lurie wrote.

Lurie is hoping to pass a citywide upzoning plan that has met fierce resistance from homeowners across San Francisco, particularly in the Westside. During their election party, pro-recall campaigners explicitly mentioned the upzoning plan as if to warn elected officials of the consequences of taking unpopular positions.

Lurie will now get to appoint the next District 4 supervisor before an election in 2026. “Our team is evaluating next steps for the District Four supervisor seat,” he wrote.

“I’m certain that the mayor will listen to us and appoints a caretaker or appointee who is going to make sure that our values are heard in this period of essential change,” said recall campaign manager Jamie Hughes on Tuesday night.

— Joe Rivano Barros

District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio conceded the election on Tuesday night.

“I accept the election results,” Engardio said in a five-minute speech, speaking to a room of some 60 supporters and press a little after 9 p.m.

But, he said, the closure of the Great Highway and its transformation into an oceanside park, which roused the ire of his electorate, was worth it. “We can still celebrate because we are on the right side of the history when it comes to Sunset Dunes.”

In a lengthy post on X at 9:47 p.m., Engardio compared to opening of the park to erecting Golden Gate Bridge. That project, he wrote, “faced a lot of resistance” too but “forward-looking people had the courage to build it anyway and create the icon of our city.”

Outside Engardio’s campaign headquarters earlier, members of the media were kept waiting in the fog until 9:10 p.m., 25 minutes after election results had dropped.

Inside, the attendees, mostly Engardio campaign staffers, projected a sense of unity: They fell silent for a minute when the results landed, rallied to cheer their candidate up when he spoke, then each shook his hand. 

Many seemed to expect the result. Supporters clapped and said, “We love you Joel,” thanking the supervisor. The supervisor promised he would say hi to them on the beach. “I’ll see you at Sunset Dunes,” he said, smiling.

Earlier today, Engardio showed Mission Local a framed picture of him and his husband at the park. It’s his favorite photo, he said, and his post-election plan is for the couple to spend more time there.

Asked whether he listened too much to constituents outside his district, Engardio replied: “The coast belongs to everybody.”

“I know I did the right thing,” he added. “In a short time, people will wonder what the controversy was about.”

— Io Yeh Gilman and Yujie Zhou

The recall crowd didn’t realize what was happening at first.

Gathered at Celia’s and awaiting the first drop of election results, recall supporters looked at their phones until one began began clapping loudly while walking into the room. Others followed.

“64! 64!” supporters began after seeing early election results tilting 64.6 percent to 35.4 percent against Joel Engardio. “He’s toast! He’s done!”

The crowd burst into cheers. The ensuing speeches were almost background noise.

Otto Pippinger, the recall campaign organizer, walked in like a winning sports player through a narrow walkway. Surrounded by people, he nodded, high-fived and fist bumped supporters along the way. “Otto! Otto! Otto!” they cheered.

“We appear to have sent a message that will resound for a long time,” said Pippinger. “Now, we are counting on the mayor to do the right thing.”

“I’m certain that the mayor will listen to us and appoints a caretaker or appointee who is going to make sure that our values are heard in this period of essential change,” he continued, referencing Mayor Daniel Lurie’s upzoning plan, which opposed by many Westside homeowners.

Jamie Hughes, the recall campaign manager, said the upzoning plan may be the next focus of an army of mobilized volunteers. And reopening the Great Highway to cars.

Earlier this year, District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan floated the idea of putting up a ballot measure to reopen the Great Highway. But even if city supervisors don’t do it, Hughes said, the recall volunteers may try for a ballot measure — even though Prop. K was widely popular across the city and won 55-45.

“It could be a voter initiative. We’ll get the signatures.”

— Junyao Yang

The first batch of 15,468 votes has dropped in the recall election of District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, and 64.7 percent are in favor of ousting the first-term supervisor. So far, 9,969 favor the recall and 4,452 favor retaining Engardio — a 4,517-vote bulge. 

Coincidentally or not, the 65 percent thus far backing the recall is eerily reminiscent of the 64 percent of District 4 voters who inveighed against Proposition K.

Prior to tonight’s vote drop, recall backers told Mission Local they were confident that Engardio could not come back if the recall polled 55 percent or greater by day’s end. Conversely, Engardio backers thought he had a puncher’s chance if he trailed by 750 votes or fewer. 

Clearly this is a lot more than 55 percent and a lot more than 750 votes.

This batch is composed of ballots received on Monday or earlier. A second, much smaller batch of votes will be released at or before 11 p.m. tonight of the perhaps hundreds of voters who cast a ballot in-person today at a polling place or City Hall. Sealed ballots dropped off at polling stations and later-arriving ballots will be tabulated starting on Thursday. 

The big question heading into this initial ballot drop was would Engardio have enough runway to make up his deficit? It appears that may not be mathematically possible.

If the low end of 20,000 voters end up participating, Engardio would need to win nearly every vote to catch up. If the high end of 25,000 voters participate, Engardio would still need to get more than 73 percent of the outstanding vote.

Jamie Hughes, the leader of the recall effort, declared victory.

“Sunset voters put their trust in Engardio and he betrayed them,” he said in a statement. “This is what happens when you choose to represent tech billionaires over the people who elected you. 

“Now it’s Mayor Lurie’s turn to appoint an honest Supervisor who listens to their constituents. D4 wants a Supervisor who will fight to reopen the Great Highway and stop Senator Wiener and the billionaires from turning ocean beach into Miami Beach. The Sunset district supported Lurie and hope he will not betray them too.”

The next ballot drop is slated for an undetermined time, hopefully before 11.

— Joe Eskenazi

Pencils down. 

It’s 8 p.m., which, on Election Day, is the witching hour. The polls are closed and all we can do is wait. In around 45 minutes, when the first batch of votes is slated to drop, we’ll know a great deal more. But here’s what we know now. 

If, by some alchemy, the initial returns come in and Joel Engardio is beating the recall, then it’s hard to see how he loses. Angry people vote sooner than less angry ones — and the anger gap between recallers and Team Joel was significant. It’s hard to imagine that the earliest voting won’t tilt significantly toward recalling Engardio. 

For voters who are undecided or indifferent — and are waiting to be persuaded — voting against the recall is the more intuitive choice. If you’re not dead-set on recalling someone, letting them finish their last year in office before a conventional election in 2026 is the obvious choice. It’s not unreasonable to predict that late-arriving ballots will skew more toward retaining Engardio than early-arriving ones. 

Many variables, however, are at play. Older voters — who are more likely to favor the recall —  are also more likely to vote in-person or drop off completed ballots at a polling station. The same goes for conservatives, who distrust voting by mail. 

Another variable: the recall of Joel Engardio is an odd and polarizing issue.“Progressives” don’t like recalls —  but they also don’t like Joel Engardio, who was never their candidate. Given the chance to kick Engardio when he’s down, many will. Or they simply won’t vote. 

How all this plays out will become more evident later. On the first ballot drop at 8:45, though, nobody expects Engardio to be leading. Not even his most ardent supporters. The questions are: By how much will he be trailing? And how much runway will he have to catch up? 

Here’s what people close to both campaigns have told Mission Local: 

• If the recall is polling at 55 percent or better at the end of the day, the recallers are confident that Engardio is beaten.

• But if the margin is slim by the end of the day, with Engardio trailing by only 750 or fewer votes, Engardio backers think that’s a deficit the candidate could overcome. 

This is not hard science. These scenarios were not carried down from Mount Sinai. But they are informed and reasonable estimates made by people with all kinds of skin in the game. So let’s see how the chips fall. 

The 15,400 ballots that were received by day’s end Monday should be unsealed and tabulated by tonight’s 8:45 first drop. The second drop, slated to come sometime before 11 p.m., will add in all the in-person votes made at polling places and City Hall today. 

This second drop figures to be small. By mid-afternoon, polling places were reporting in-person vote counts numbering in the teens. A reasonable over-under on how many ballots will make up that second vote drop is perhaps 750. 

The sealed ballots dropped off at polling stations, however, won’t be counted until Thursday (the Department of Elections takes the day after an election off). But even if three or four times as many people dropped off sealed ballots or placed them in the mail, not a hell of a lot more votes figure to be coming. It will make a difference in the event it’s close.

As Yogi Berra was wont to say, it ain’t over till it’s over. But it can only go two ways. 

When San Francisco politicos are asked what it would take for recalls to fade from prominence, a common answer is “when someone beats one.” If Engardio does somehow elude this recall, he would be the first elected official in local history since Mayor Dianne Feinstein beat a recall brought about by eccentric gun nuts. This came in 1983, when the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were recent memories. This was a setup that did not favor the recallers. And no local official has beaten one since. 

A San Francisco recall election forces an incumbent to run against him or herself. Unlike the California gubernatorial recall of 2021, there is no Larry Elder for voters dissatisfied with Gavin Newsom to recoil from. It’s a candidate vs. themselves. 

That’s hard for anyone and bodes not well for Engardio, who won the ranked-choice election that put him in office with just 50.87 percent of the vote. If Engardio eludes this recall, he and his team will be talking about this day for years, the way Joe Namath is still talking about Super Bowl III. 

But if Engardio loses, it sends a different message. It would be the first modern recall undertaken without billionaire backers — and, in fact, in the face of the billionaires who threw a significant sum into keeping Engardio in office. It would, as we’ve written before, be a shot across the bow of every San Francisco elected official. Every supervisor who votes for Mayor Daniel Lurie’s upzoning plan isn’t going to face a potential recall. But any supervisor who is perceived as not listening to their constituents is taking his or her chances. 

We haven’t even discussed who would potentially be appointed to fill out Engardio’s term if he loses. Will that person be a caretaker with more leeway to take controversial votes? Or will the appointee harbor aspirations for the full-time job?  Will San Franciscans be asked to vote to repeal Prop. K next year? Would this measure be a stalking horse and springboard for candidates hoping to win higher office? 

But, first, all the votes must be counted. It all starts at 8:45. — Joe Eskenazi

At board meetings, supervisors are given the chance to honor someone who recently passed away, and today Joel Engardio memorialized Kwang Hwin, an Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs ambassador whose tasks included giving directions, escorting students during their field trips, and making emergency calls.

“Music was one of his great joys, and his guitar brought him peace and comfort and did the same for those lucky enough to hear him play,” Engardio said.

The meeting was relatively short, wrapping after less than an hour and a half — perfect for Engardio, who has more voters to reach. He’s decided to use the rest of the day to make phone calls to voters since it’s faster than going door to door.

As the supervisors filed out, he stopped to have short conversations with Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Stephen Sherrill.

— Io Yeh Gilman

Imperiled Supervisor Joel Engardio cut a solitary figure in the Sunset this morning, knocking doors for four hours on his own before reporting to his day job at City Hall. 

It wasn’t a bad day, he told Mission Local’s Io Yeh Gilman — he urged a few supporters to actually turn in their ballots and ran into a few more boosters who’d already voted. 

Every vote counts — but, come 8:45, some 15,400 votes will drop. Between 20,000 and 25,000 votes are expected overall. Engardio, his campaign says, “has always been our secret weapon” — and he is a very effective and endearing one-on-one communicator. But he’s also one man. He is not John Henry building a railroad all by his lonesome. 

But Engardio was indeed the only person in his campaign knocking on doors today. The rest of Team Joel dropped off literature at 5:30 a.m. so voters would wake up to it, and are now phone-banking. After 30,000 knocked doors in three months, the campaign viewed this as the most effective use of its resources. 

Every campaign is different and is working off its own internal metrics. But this move struck veteran campaigners as counter-intuitive. 

“If you’ve ID’d people who have not voted yet, the normal thing to do, the standard operating procedure in campaigns, is to knock on their doors and ask them to go vote,” said veteran political consultant Jim Ross, who was campaign manager for Gavin Newsom’s winning 2003 mayoral bid. “It’s odd to me. They have money. When people are complaining that you’re contacting them too much, you’re doing just enough.” 

Ross warned against intuiting tonight’s outcome based upon this or any election day strategy by either campaign. 

Kaylah Williams May, who was the campaign manager for Chesa Boudin’s upset victory in the 2019 DA’s race, was also taken aback at the decision to pull back from the field. 

“You knock on doors every day,” she said. “It tends to be thin margins for a high-stakes race.” 

May cautioned that every campaign “has its own set of data. And they may know something we don’t.” 

Longtime San Francisco consultant David Ho said, however, that nothing is as effective at turning out voters as meeting them in person. “Talking to voters on the phone is not going to be as effective.” 

“You need phone bankers and canvassers and folks passing stuff out at polling stations, despite historical recent trends where most voters vote absentee.” 

Engardio’s campaign feels it will win or lose with its secret weapon: Engardio himself. 

“Nothing beats a direct conversation with your supervisor,” says the campaign, “in terms of gaining votes.”

— Joe Eskenazi

The park that could soon cost Engardio his job is filled with people and animals all enjoying the open space. Their views on Engardio’s fate, however, differ.

“I don’t live here. But if I lived here, I would recall him,” said Mario Ramirez, a 50-year old Bernal Heights resident. He believes closing the Upper Great Highway is bad for the traffic and causes more air pollution. Instead, he suggested keeping half of the park for recreation while turning the half dedicated to cycling into car lanes.

“A hybrid approach was ideal,” echoed a Sunset voter walking with two friends who preferred to stay anonymous. He favors the Upper Great Highway’s previous schedule: weekdays for traffic, weekends for people and bikes.

The current Sunset Dunes that still looks much like a highway seems incomplete to him. “If they’re gonna keep a park, they should allocate budget to” make it into an actual park, he added.

More people at Sunset Dunes today, including car owners who live by the Upper Great Highway, said they liked the park.

“This is good for me, because I like walking,” said Alex V., a 65-year-old Richmond District resident, who likes to spend hours walking there.

“I use the [Upper] Great Highway more now that it’s for walking than I did for driving,” said Tara Sullivan, 71, who walks along Sunset Dunes several times a week. While people who live at both ends of the highway near Sloat or Lincoln could hop on to the highway right there, people like Sullivan who live in the middle had to go out of their way to drive on it.

When the sun is out, Sullivan said, the Sunset Dunes is packed with people picnicking, reading, walking, lounging in hammocks, kids on skateboards, little children learning to ride bicycles, and loads of strollers.

“Even when I drove, I didn’t really use this road,” said Chris Young, a 48th Avenue resident who lives in the middle of the Upper Great Highway. “I think there are like 50 other streets that people can take literally.”

While many of his neighbors are furious that Engardio didn’t listen to his constituents, Young, who voted Yes on K, said, “Well, he did listen to the community, just a different part of the community.”

— Yujie Zhou

There’s nothing ablaze at Firehouse No. 18 on 32nd Avenue. Poll workers outnumber voters by a goodly amount. As of 1:55 p.m., they report 14 people have voted here in-person. Two more voters show up as if on cue, but they are voting provisionally. 

Many more voters than that have dropped off their sealed vote-by-mail ballots in the box, however. It seems safe to say at this point that the tally of in-person voters added to the second vote drop at or before 11 p.m. will not look a lot different than the first, which drops at about 8:45. Sealed ballots won’t be unsealed until Thursday. 

Retired military man Will Wood was one of the voters dropping off his sealed ballot at the firehouse today. He wasn’t thrilled with his choice. 

“It was a 50/50,” he explained. “People should be represented. And if they don’t feel represented…” his voice trails off. 

“On the other hand, if there’s a recall, the next person is appointed, not elected.” 

In the end, Wood was moved by the enthusiasm of his pro-recall neighbors. He voted Yes on A to recall Joel Engardio. He wishes Engardio held more town halls; Assemblymember Phil Ting used to hold town halls, Wood said, and district supervisors piggybacked on those. 

So Wood voted to recall. But he’s not thrilled with it. 

“You can’t win for losing,” he says.

— Joe Eskenazi

While Sunset voters miles away decide his fate, Engardio is at San Francisco City Hall for a key part of his job — attending the weekly 2 p.m. Board of Supervisors meeting. It’s been business as usual for his day job, staffers say, with lots of constituent calls and legislation to write.

Engardio showed up 15 minutes before the board meeting, fresh off four hours of morning door-knocking. He said it went well — he convinced a few supporters to actually go out and vote and also ran into a few voters who had already voted for him.

After the board meeting, he plans to get back out there — he hasn’t decided whether it’ll be phone calls or knocking on more doors though.

Meanwhile, in the basement of City Hall, election workers are counting up the ballots — and have received around a dozen more today from a voters who came in person.

They also received several new voter registration forms from League of Women Voters members Rebecca Miller and Paula March Romanosky, who held an event at the Larkin St. Youth Center today in honor of National Voter Registration Day. Miller, a District 4 resident, said she dropped off a sealed ballot this morning.

— Io Yeh Gilman

“Hello. Helllloooooo! Ni-hao! It’s Heather, your neighbor from 28th and Ortega. Have you voted today? You don’t want to read about it tomorrow.” 

Retired National Park Service worker Heather Davies, who does indeed live at 28th and Ortega, is chipper and high-energy; with her mellifluous, sing-song voice she sounds a bit like a children’s television host as she works through one low-slung, salt water taffy-colored Outer Sunset house after the other, checking would-be recall voters off her master list. 

A grey and foggy morning transitions into a grey and foggy afternoon, but Davies is nothing but sunny. She has a friendly audience out here at Judah and 33rd; it’s as if she’s selling beer on a scorching summer day.  

Observing Davies interact with unseen voters on the other side of doors, the children’s television show parallel is only reinforced. Homeowners on the other side of a door can only be heard in a muffled tone, so Davies, as if she was speaking to an invisible TV audience or mute puppet, fills in both sides of the conversation. 

Hello! Helllloooooo! Ni-hao! Have you voted yet? You will? In an hour? Is that so? That’s right, we can’t get rid of him soon enough! Will you be voting Yes on A? You will? 

And here the voter’s voice is now loud enough to hear from the street: “For sure!” 

Davies is playing the short game and the long game. When she finds a receptive Yes on A voter, she slips in a flier about the forthcoming effort to upzone vast swaths of the city. Ask voters out here on 33rd Avenue about this and you’ll get a pretty consistent response: No sir, I don’t like it. And Davies hasn’t even told them about paying for all the new utilities and logistical needs for scores of thousands of new residents the plan would bring.

“And Joel is in favor of this?” asks an incredulous middle-aged Asian woman in a pink sweater and grey sweats. 

“Yes, he fully endorses it!” Davies replies. She accuses Engardio of, once again, failing to talk to his constituents about this. 

“Oh, oh, I’ll vote in one hour!” she replies. “Thank you. Thank you for coming. Keep going. Keep going!” 

She does. A barefoot man with a Johnny Unitas-style buzz admits that “one of my babies” took down his Recall Engardio sign. He accepts another and affixes it to his home on the spot. 

“Goooooood  morning! And what a beautiful Tuesday morning it is!” Davies says as she knocks on the door of a multifamily home. These are target-rich environments. Six voters live here. 

Nearby, she hands a recall sign to John Tsang, who is drying lemon grass and peanuts in front of his home. As she does with voters less steady with English, Davies makes sure to remind him that “Yes on A is ‘Goodbye to Joel.’” 

Nearby, Gary Lo, a resident of the Sunset since 1993, affirms he’s already voted to recall his supervisor. This is something he didn’t see coming when Engardio narrowly beat incumbent Gordon Mar in 2022. 

“Everybody liked him in the beginning,” Lo said. “He was just too, how can I put it, he did everything courageously. But some things need input.” 

Thinking on the matter, Lo said the “female supervisors” repping District 4 — which include Katy Tang, Carmen Chu and Fiona Ma in his time here — have been better. 

It’s just after noon and Davies is on to the next house. She routinely works off lists of 100 addresses and, in the last few days, says she has registered a 50 percent success rate — even with voters who’ve failed to return texts or calls. 

“Hello. Helllloooooo! Ni-hao! It’s Heather, your neighbor from 28th and Ortega. Knock, knock, knock! Have you voted today?”

— Joe Eskenazi

Heading over the hills and into the Sunset, one hits the ever-present fog. Physically, the temperature here today is low. Metaphysically, it’s hot. People are riled up, and we’ll find out just how riled up when polls close at 8 p.m. 

But even when it’s loud in the Sunset, it’s quiet. At Recall Central, aka deputy campaign manager Otto Pippenger’s house on 27th Ave., only Pippenger is manning the fort.

All the volunteers are out knocking on doors or otherwise Getting Out The Vote. Pippenger is on at least one phone call while drinking black coffee and smoking an American Spirit. 

It’s been a long day, and it’s not even noon: Election Day starts in the pre-dawn hours and, every Election Day in Pippenger’s career has been kicked off by people brawling in the street in the wee hours, or a car-horn-honking melee or, today, a drunk picking a fight with the garbage cans. 

While the day started early, Pippenger doesn’t expect it to go late. The tally of the first batch of some 15,400 early ballots will drop at 8:45 p.m., with the de minimis ballots of in-person voters added in a second tranche sometime before 11 tonight.

This figures to be a very limited number of voters; perhaps 30 or so for each of the 21 in-person polling places. Sealed ballots dropped off at polling places and later mailed ballots will be opened starting Thursday. 

Just how many total votes will be recorded is anyone’s guess: 40 percent turnout would be 20,000; 50 percent — the likely ceiling — would be 25,000. At 8:45, Pippenger expects to know how this one is going to go.  

At noon today, this quiet Sunset abode adorned with God-knows-how-many recall signs will, once again, be something more akin to a buzzing nexus as volunteers return from their rounds and check in. Signs of progress or worry, both scientific and unscientific, will be discussed. 

In the meantime, a reporter chatting with Pippenger sits on the neighbor’s adjoining steps. Pippenger says they’re cool, but he has no idea how they’re going to vote. 

“Honestly, I haven’t broached the subject,” he says.

— Joe Eskenazi

At 10:15 a.m., Guan and Lou, two grey-haired Chinese elders, sat at the playground near Parkside Library, sipping coffee. It’s an almost daily ritual for the two, sitting and chatting.

“Sunset does not need that road,” Guan said, in a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin. He has lived in the Sunset for decades. “And, after today, you still can’t change it.”

When asked if they prefer an open road or a coastal park — they both drive — they answered without hesitation, “Of course we need the park. It’s nice to sit there and chat. In the early evening, seniors take strolls there,” Lou said.

Guan seemed most upset about how much money has been spent on this issue. “The back-and-forth on the Great Highway costs money. The election costs money,” Guan said. “It’s all taxpayers’ money.”

— Junyao Yang

The doors are unlocked at a house near 35th Ave. and Judah St. where the recall Engardio campaign is headquartered for the day. John Crabtree, the volunteer coordinator, is marshaling his team from the kitchen table.

Volunteers arrive every 10 to 15 minutes to hear instructions, grab scripts and pick up yellow signs that read “Recall Joel Engardio.”

“This isn’t a job for most of us. This is a volunteer activity. And people disrupt their lives for this,” said Crabtree, who expects 20 to 40 people to drop by the house today.

Crabtree joined the campaign in January, when they were just gathering signatures, and said he has been doing a little bit of everything for the past 8 months to prepare for this day.

“There’s a deep, deep sense of betrayal,” he said. For Crabtree, the closure of the Upper Great Highway is “a really big example of how people were promised, and told, and led to believe that Joel Engardio would be an advocate for them … and that was a deception.”

Today, Crabtree is manning the phones, rallying volunteers and mapping out when and where they can hit the streets for door-to-door outreach. “There’s a sense of relief that we’ve made it,” he added. “This has been a long road, and very, very hard. Very challenging.”

The campaign plans to spend the final day going out to a list of highlighted addresses of identified supporters — people who’ve signed the petition or told the campaign they support the recall — to ensure they’ve voted.

If they haven’t, the volunteers will make sure they know where their polling stations are and answer any last-minutes questions to help them out.

— Yujie Zhou

Ariana, a four-year Sunset resident, dropped off her and her husband’s ballots, hand in hand with her daughter. 

She had made up her mind long ago, but the ballots were still sitting on the counter until today. “Both of us wanted someone who can represent us better.”

Chan, who has lived in the Sunset for more than 20 years, said she got every reminder she could possibly get about the recall: Seven to eight text messages in two weeks, phone calls, TV news and door knockers. She said she grew tired of it, and felt the recall was a waste of time.

“He didn’t do anything wrong,” Chan said in Mandarin. “Why don’t you let him finish his last year?”

Tim Van Loan walked out of the polls at Lincoln High School in a bike helmet and dress shoes and immediately started to text his neighbors. The voting machine told him he was one of the 33 percent of people who voted, and he found that ridiculous.

“I was surprised by how low it is!” He said as he sent off a text.

He knew about the recall, but forgot that today is Election Day until he saw the news.

Van Loan said he was empathetic toward Engardio’s situation.

“He’s probably pretty screwed,” Van Loan said. “He could’ve definitely done a better job, but I don’t think what he did is out of line of what he campaigned on.”

When Engardio ran for supervisor in 2022, both he and his opponent, Gordon Mar, were supportive of closing the Great Highway on weekends and opening it to cars on workdays.

But at a debate with Mar, Engardio had said he was supportive of that approach, seen as a compromise, because it didn’t rule out the potential of a permanent park.

— Junyao Yang

It was foggy and quiet in Lakeshore this morning. Between the two polling stations there, only around a dozen voters came by between 7 and 8:30 a.m., mostly to drop off ballots in person. The Department of Elections has already received hundreds of mailed ballots from the neighborhood.

Lakeshore is where Joel Engardio lives, and it heavily supported him back in 2022, when he won the seat after the neighborhood was redistricted from District 7 to District 4.

But these precincts were some of the ones least supportive of turning the Great Highway into a park, and are now expected to heavily favor his recall.

Precincts that supported Joel Engardio the most strongly opposed Prop. K

Precincts added to

District 4 in 2022

Percentage of District 4 voters who voted

against Prop. K in November 2024.

Percentage of first-choice votes Joel Engardio

received in the 2022 District 4 supervisor race.

Precincts added to

District 4 in 2022

Percentage of first-choice votes Joel Engardio

received in the 2022 District 4 supervisor race.

Percentage of District 4 voters who voted

against Prop. K in November 2024.

Chart by Kelly Waldron. Data from the San Francisco Department of Elections. Basemap from Mapbox.

One first-time voter, who was about to head off to college, explained that closing the Great Highway meant his commute to school got 10 to 15 minutes slower. So, he’s voting “yes” on the recall.

“With me going to school every day, it just kind of created more stress and chaos to our mornings,” he said.

What frustrated their family, his mom added, was not even necessarily the park but the process by which it was created. Engardio should have worked with neighbors to make a plan for how to help with traffic, she said.

Now, they want someone new. “I would hope for someone that is a little bit more in touch with the people that they’re supervising,” her son said.

— Io Yeh Gilman

At 7:30 a.m., the Sunset is engulfed in a fog so thick it’s hard to see the next block over. It’s quiet, and one can hear moisture drip from overhead power lines.

By 8 a.m. at the Lincoln High School polling place, two people have voted in person and a handful have dropped off their ballots. One of them came with five ballots, poll workers said.

The poll workers, two of them Chinese speakers, expect just about 30 people to vote in person all day today, and another 50 to drop off their ballots.

“This is definitely the most simple election I’ve worked on,” said M. Murphy, who has worked on seven previous elections.

Karen Melander-Magoon, who lives in North Beach, took paratransit to the Sunset around 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning.

“Part of the thing, as poll worker, we vote in advance,” said Murphy. Everyone in the room nodded. “I like to get it done early,” Melander-Magoon added.

But most people wait until the very last minute, the poll workers agreed. In a regular election, “the idea is that there could be a last-minute revelation, people hold off till the day of to get all the information,” he said. “With this special election with just two sides, both are very firm on their belief.”

Still, voting in person is expected to be slow today. A worker from the Department of Elections said it forecasts a turnout of at most 50 percent overall.

In the past, turnout for in-person voting is usually 10 to 12 percent. But because this election is unique — there hasn’t been a district-level recall election — it’s hard to predict, he said.

Outside the school building, a “vote here” sign pointed way to the polling place. A woman, passing by, stopped and made a face, “Voting?”

After this reporter explained the district election to recall its supervisor, she exclaimed, “Oh, that’s what I saw on the news last night!”

“I live in Pacifica,” she said. “We don’t do it.”

— Junyao Yang