An important note about our voter guide…

If you are not familiar with how ranked choice voting works, STOP and watch this video before continuing. In this June 2026 election, the supervisor offices will be filled by ranked choice voting.

In ranked choice voting elections, it is absolutely critical that, in any given race, you rank every single candidate that you believe would be better — even marginally — than any unranked candidates. You must not “bullet-vote” and rank only your single favorite candidate.

Why not? What happens when people bullet-vote? In 2019, nearly a thousand Republicans voted for Ryan Lam, the only GOP candidate in the race for District 5 Supervisor. When Lam was eliminated from contention, hundreds of ballots cast for Lam were “exhausted” — meaning that the voters who filled out those ballots bullet-voted and did not rank a second-choice candidate. Therefore, with Lam gone, voters who filled out those ballots had no say in what happened next. Still in the race were Vallie Brown, a Democrat, and Dean Preston, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Brown was not a good candidate, having emerged from the same political machine that created former Mayor London Breed — but she was a much better candidate than Preston, who advocated for defunding the police and blamed San Francisco’s homelessness crisis on “capitalism.” Unfortunately, Preston won that race by 185 votes, meaning that if only 186 more Republicans had bothered to rank Brown as their second choice, San Francisco would not have had a socialist on its Board of Supervisors for five years, undermining our city’s economic recovery, denying our neighbors their fundamental right to public safety, and advocating for policies that have resulted in thousands of overdose deaths. Brown may have been bad. Preston was much, much worse.

Our voter guide was designed with scenarios like this in mind. What happened in the Lam/Brown/Preston race was not an isolated incident. It happened in the District Attorney race that year, too, resulting in the election of Chesa Boudin. We can’t risk something like that again.

So, how did we decide on the rankings and recommendations in our voter guide? These were informed by multiple factors: how closely aligned the candidate is with our principles, how well we expect the candidate to perform in the particular office they’re seeking, how willing the candidate is to engage with conservatives in San Francisco, how serious a campaign the candidate is running, and how much will our recommendation help the candidate versus others in the race. Thus, our ranking or recommending a candidate does not necessarily imply endorsement. Sometimes, the alternatives are just much worse!