It’s Wednesday … do you know who your next mayor is?
on November 10, 2010
As of Wednesday morning, eight days after Oakland voters went to the polls to select their new mayor from among a field of ten candidates, there is still no new information about the outcome of the city’s first-ranked choice election, according to officials at the Alameda County Registrar of Voters. The final tally remains unknown, with no indication of when the results will be certified.
Officials at the registrar’s office have said that the wait is not due to the new ranked-choice voting system, but rather to the time required to verify outstanding mail-in and provisional ballots, those contingent on verifying voter eligibility. Guy Ashley, spokesperson for Alameda Registrar of Voters, said there have been no updates since the ranked-choice calculation was run last week. “There’s been no update since last Friday,” Ashley said.
Residents fill out provisional ballots when they are not on the list of registered voters at their polling place. This can happen when a voter changes residences close to an election. The voter puts their completed ballot in an envelope with their information on the outside. The Registrar counts the ballot once the voter is found to be validly registered in Alameda County.
Though Thursday is Veteran’s Day, a county holiday, the registrar of voters has said that staff will be available to count votes through the holiday if necessary.
The latest available count, released by the registrar on Friday evening, showed city council member Jean Quan leading the race by a 1,876-vote margin over former state senator Don Perata. With several thousand votes not yet included in the tally, the recalculated count could favor either top candidate.
A final result had been expected Monday afternoon—Quan scheduled a press conference in anticipation of the news—but the registrar issued an announcement that it would require additional time to count several thousand provisional ballots. Ashley said that there won’t be an update until the full results become available, and that will depend on how quickly the registrar can finish counting. “It depends how well we do counting the provisional ballots,” he said.
Oakland North will continue to follow the story … stay tuned!
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Image: Over a week since Oakland’s first ranked-choice election, there is no certified result and no indication of when that might come. Illustration by Danielle Genzel.
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Ranked election theft is what we are now watching in the Oakland mayoral election. My understanding of our American democracy is that elections are won by the person with the most votes. A simple and straight forward way of picking an election winner: just count all the votes and the candidate with the most votes is declared the winner. But election losers in the City of Oakland apparently tired of that simplicity. No, they decided that no one could be an election winner unless they had a majority of all the votes cast. Now this presented a small problem: what if no one candidate got a majority of all the votes cast in an election? So the powers that be invented a run-off election staged between the top two candidates. But the perennial election losers tired of this. No, they wanted to devise an election system that turned losers into winners. So we now have a rank voting system where the second and third choices of voters who voted for the least popular
candidate can now be as important as the original votes for the leading candidate. This is insane. This is voters in Wonderland. It is illegal and unconstitutional to “distribute” the votes of one candidate and give them to another candidate. This rank election counting scheme violates my rights to have my vote counted in an honest election.
Guess your guy lost huh James? Don;t you just hate that democracy thing where you lose?
The title of the article is “It’s Wednesday … do you know who your next mayor is?” Nobody has won or lost yet.
Ranked choice prevents money from dominating the election. Don’t worry, James, it won’t last–the powers that be will just buy off more candidates next time.