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Oakland’s mayoral race goes to runoff vote count today

on November 5, 2010

At 4 p.m. Friday afternoon, the vote for Oakland’s mayor will head to a runoff vote count, determining whether front-runner Don Perata will maintain his lead, or whether trailing contenders Jean Quan, Rebecca Kaplan or Joe Tuman will be able to catch up.

On Tuesday, November 2, residents of Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro voted with a ranked-choice ballot for the first time. Under the rules of ranked-choice voting, a system approved by Oakland voters in 2006, voters rank their top three choices for mayor on the ballot. First-choice votes are tallied, and if no candidate receives a majority—more than 50 percent of the vote—then the last-place candidate is eliminated. The ballots that ranked an eliminated candidate as their first choice will have their second choice counted instead. The process continues until one candidate reaches a majority and officially wins the election.

After a lengthy campaign season involving ten mayoral candidates, Tuesday night’s first-choice results showed Perata with 35.2 percent of the vote, an 11-point lead over Quan, but still short of the majority required to win the election outright, prompting Friday’s run-off count. Quan received 24.3 percent over the vote, followed by Kaplan with 20.82 percent. Tuman placed fourth with 11.95 percent of first-choice votes.

A computer at the Registrar of Voters office will run the calculation Friday afternoon, but representatives cautioned that official results may not be available for days or weeks.

Stay tuned to Oakland North for up-to-the-minute coverage of election results.

You can read our previous Oakland elections coverage on our Campaign 2010 page, or follow us on Facebook or on Twitter.

2 Comments

  1. Ben on November 5, 2010 at 11:54 am

    For the record, at the current tally it’s mathematically impossible for Tuman to catch up. Based on the numbers you gave, only 19.68% of the vote went to candidates other than Perata, Quan, and Kaplan. So even if Tuman got the 2nd-place vote of every other candidate below him, he’d still be more than 1% behind Kaplan and would be eliminated.



  2. caliwest on November 5, 2010 at 1:45 pm

    As we come down to the final results and find out who will be mayor of Oakland, some people now want to make nice. Their candidate has won (or most likely will win) and they want to admonish those who were critical of Mr. Perata. They are trying to provide their own past experiences as though they have insight in to why people were critical. At the same time their recent comments are meant to be a warning to others not sink to character assassination as if they are morally superior and without blame.

    What I find so interesting is the very people (or person) who is accusing others of character assassination has done so with impunity. His or her followers have stood by while untrue, hurtful and derogatory comments were tossed out and were meant to discredit the character of a candidate in which they disagreed.

    Instead of engaging in debate when challenged to defend their comments, they hid behind their words, lobbing back even more invectives. I’ve yet to hear an apology from these people who were the first to engage in character assassination.

    Smug, sanctimonious comments are not going to bring about understanding or a better Oakland. What it does is show the true moral failings of the accuser(s) and will ensure that the same type of behavior will continue in politics and the society at large. Admit your faults, look inside yourself to honestly look at what you’ve done to contribute to the rancor, apologize and then maybe you will have respect from the wider community.



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