S.F. Prosecutor Narrowly Wins Reelection

Terence Hallinan, a pugnacious prosecutor who campaigned as “America’s most progressive district attorney,” narrowly beat Bill Fazio, according to the latest results from an excruciatingly slow ballot count.

Hallinan’s lead widened to an insurmountable 1,758 votes Wednesday, or 50.4% of the 208,124 ballots counted in the Dec. 14 runoff, election officials said.

The latest count released Wednesday afternoon showed Hallinan with 104,941 votes to 103,183, or 49.5%, for Fazio, a former assistant district attorney who also lost to Hallinan in 1995.

The 2,546 ballots counted Wednesday were considered provisional for a variety of reasons--they might have been mangled, or the person voting was not listed on the rolls at the polling place, or voted at the wrong polling place.

Each provisional ballot must be inspected by hand, and those that were most easily verified have already been counted. Those that remain--fewer than 1,700 by one estimate--are more problematic and increasingly likely to be tossed out, said Theresa Rabe, campaign services manager for the city’s Department of Elections.

Rabe said the final results should be released Thursday.

Hallinan’s campaign spokesman, Ross Mirkarimi, wasn’t ready to declare victory Wednesday, but he noted that the election department’s computers were shut down, meaning that there are few valid ballots left to count.

“We’re getting down to the bare bottom now, and what’s left to be picked over statistically won’t make a difference,” Mirkarimi said.

Counting the general and runoff elections, this is the fourth time that Hallinan and Fazio faced off for district attorney. In the 1995 runoff, Hallinan had 52% of the vote to Fazio’s 48%.

Terence “Kayo” Hallinan, 62, is a former boxer, city supervisor and civil rights lawyer who has refused to carry out the war on drugs as prosecutor. Instead, he has put minor drug offenders and nonviolent criminals through school rather than jail.

Fazio, 52, was for 20 years a prosecutor under Hallinan’s predecessors.