Since 2010, the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro have joined San Francisco in
the use of an instant runoff
process to elect its mayor and council members. This way, voters rank their choices
on one ballot,
rather than vote for one candidate in one election and then another in a
separate runoff election.
In 2022, Albany adopted at-large multi-winner ranked-choice voting to address a voting rights legal challenge without dividing the already small city into
districts.
Here, you can see results for those contests with
more than one round, and try Ranked Choice practice polls.
Rank the candidates you support, in order of preference.
Candidate
1st choice
2nd choice
3rd choice
Lou
Bob
Kim
Your vote will count for your highest-ranked candidate, but some candidates
may be eliminated.
Your vote counts for Bob, your first choice. Nobody has a majority mandate from voters.
50%
Kim
Lou
Bob
So we eliminate Bob, and recount.
Kim gets enough of Bob's second choices to get a majority.
50%
Kim
Lou
In this count, because Bob was eliminated, your vote counted for Kim, your second choice.
Oakland's April 15, 2025 special election for mayor and District 2 councilmember
Oakland's special election will fill the mayor's office vacated by the November 2024 recall of Sheng
Thao, and fill the council district 2 seat vacated by Nikki Fortunato Bas, who was elected to the
Alameda County Board of Supervisors, replacing the retiring Keith Carson, a leading supporter of
ranked-choice voting and proportional representation.
The November 2024 results are from the Dec 3 cast vote record (CVR) release. This may be the final certified data, but the Registrar of Voters has not
confirmed
this. For this election, the county released preliminary cast vote records as votes were being counted. In the past, cast vote records were not
released until after final certification. In an apparent attempt to comply with Elections Code
15250.5 and a
memo from the Secretary of State,
the Registrar of Voters omitted ballots from precincts with less then 10 votes cast.
So, in the November 2024 results below, two precincts in Oakland were
omitted. This has caused 8 missing votes in the Oakland at-large contest and 2 missing votes from the Oakland District 7 contest. One omitted precinct is
the Oakland Airport, which is in Oakland city limits, but is in the San Leandro school district, as can be seen on the maps below. The other is near the small
boot-shaped appendage of Redwood Regional Park along Oakland city limits. The Eden Health District, which provides services to Hayward and nearby
unincorporated areas, has an appendage in its District 3 that extends through unpopulated wilderness to cross into Oakland. These create unique combinations of
contests on the ballots where the jurisdictions overlap, requiring separate precincts.
While
Elections Code 15250.5 applies only to posting of results on election night, the Registrar is also omitting votes from the final certified Statement of Vote
and CVRs, which seems inconsistent with Elections Code
15372-15374.
In November 2022, there was a mixup in the settings when the Registrar tallied that election, regarding ballots with a blank first choice but
valid lower choices. This led to a court-ordered change in a certified election result for Oakland school director district 4,
and a close call in San Leandro council district 5. By late 2024,
this has still not been fully clarified in the county's posted results. Also, the 2018 and 2020 RCV results are not posted on the
Registrar's website, but you can find an unofficial interpretation of those results below.
This map shows city council districts for Berkeley (B), Oakland (O), and San Leandro (SL).
Oakland also has one at-large city council member. San Leandro council members are elected
at large, but must reside in their district. Albany is just north of B1 and about the same size.
The map below shows Oakland school director districts. Albany is shaded at top left.
Maps are derived from those at the data page of the Alameda County Registrar of Voters.
There is ongoing community advocacy for more ranking columns. If there are not as many ranking columns as candidates (or actually that minus one) people can use all of the columns and still not
have their vote count in the final round.
In November 2024, the Oakland at-large contest had 10 candidates, but only 5 ranking columns were provided.
Oakland's charter
1105(k)(1) allows fewer rankings than candidates only if "the voting equipment cannot feasibly accommodate" the same number of rankings.
Meanwhile, San Francisco provided 10 ranking columns in its 13-candidate mayoral contest using the same
voting equipment. The
stats page shows that 3341 voters (2.3%) used all 5 rankings but still
exhausted. Surely many of them would have made use of additional columns, and then would have been more likely to have their vote counted in the
final round. In Oakland's 10-candidate mayoral election in 2022, the
number of these involuntarily exhausted ballots exceeds the margin of
victory. Those ballots would have had to vote
overwhelmingly for the second-place candidate to change the winner, but this was another case where more ranking columns should have been available.
There are about 17 ranked-choice contests held every two years in Alameda County.
The contests that are not shown here had a first-round winner.
In the 42 multi-round contests between 2010 and 2022, there were 1,347,680 votes that counted in at least the first
round.
The results shown here are an independent, unofficial analysis of cast vote records released by the county. Some
results differ slightly from those published by the county. In some
instances, if a ballot's first choice is blank or for an invalid
write-in, but also has lower choices other than an invalid write-in, the county calls it a "suspended" ballot and does not count it
until round 2.
In some years, the 'exhausted ballots' in the results published by the county include those of voters who did not
cast a vote at all in the
ranked-choice contest, but voted in other contests such as president or senator.
The results released by the county separate out all "overvotes" (more than one vote
in the same column), whereas the DemoChoice software treats them as votes for "none of
these". Ballots with first-round overvotes are ignored in the results shown here.
In some single-winner contests, the county has continued eliminations until only one candidate remains.
DemoChoice eliminates all but winners in multi-winner contests, but not single-winner contests.
** indicates contests where a winner overcame a leading first-round candidate in later rounds.
* indicates single-winner contests where a candidate who was not one of the top two in the first round was in the top two in the final round.
