No recount: Chaotic race to be Oakland’s next mayor is officially over

OAKLAND — The dramatic race that saw Sheng Thao elected to Oakland’s highest political office appears, at last, to be finished.

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters on Friday declared that a planned recount of the ballots ended in forfeit after none of the 10 people who formally requested it came up with the required amount of money.

And while the Oakland NAACP earlier this week said it was receiving donations to cover the county’s costs, it could not meet payments of $21,000 required each day that the registrar’s staff had to reprocess ballots cast in the race.

Thao now has a clear path to being sworn in as mayor the first week of January, since the registrar’s deadline to accept a request for a recount expired on Tuesday. In the final results, she edged out fellow Councilmember Loren Taylor by 677 ranked choice votes.

“All parties were notified that today was the start date,” said county Registrar Tim Dupuis in an interview. “We never did start the recount — it’s forfeited. Each person who requested one couldn’t come up with the funds.”

The registrar’s announcement followed a rally by the local NAACP chapter demanding a recount despite not having the money. Dupuis, however, said the office was simply following state election laws that require those requesting a recount of an election to pay for it themselves.

Thao won last month by a margin of about 0.55% in ranked choice results. She became the second person to be elected as Oakland’s mayor despite not securing the most first-place votes. Taylor, who received the most, used part of his concession speech last month to criticize the ranked choice format, saying it is “not working.”

The ranked choice system uses second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-place selections on ballots to transfer votes between candidates until one of them secures a majority. It gives voters more choices upfront and saves money on holding separate primary and general elections.

But this year’s race saw 3,000 overvotes, or ballots that were filled out incorrectly so that more than one candidate was selected in a particular choice column.

For reference, the 2010 mayoral election — in which Jean Quan bested Don Perata through ranked choice voting instead of plurality voter support — saw 526 overvotes, far fewer than the 2022 race despite similar levels of turnout in each race.

“We need a better voter education process to cure the misunderstanding of the ranked choice system,” said Oakland NAACP President George Holland Sr. in an interview this week.

Dupuis said he and the city clerk will look over the outcomes of all 2022 countywide elections and assess what could be done to better inform the public next election.

And while the registrar took nearly two weeks to finish counting countywide votes, Dupuis maintains it was the proliferation of mail-in ballots that lengthened the timeline — processing ranked choice votes had nothing to with it, he said.

The registrar actually “cured,” or made legitimate, certain ballots that would otherwise have been overvotes, so long as the vote could be transferred to one of the candidates before it ran into an error.

For instance, a voter who selected eventual third-place candidate Ignacio De La Fuente as their top choice, Taylor second and multiple candidates third would still have their vote transferred to Taylor by the race’s end, despite their mistake in the third column.

“It’s only once we hit the point of an overvote error that it would become one,” Dupuis said. “And every vote that gets by flagged by the computer as an overvote gets reviewed by a human so we know for sure.”