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.
Try a practice poll for the November 2024 contests!
This is an exciting and dramatic year for East Bay ranked-choice voting. Richmond voters will choose between ballot measures that would adopt either RCV or two-round runoff
elections. After this election, Albany's city council and board of education will have been entirely elected by multi-seat proportional RCV. The drama is mainly in Oakland,
where Mayor Sheng Thao faces a recall measure, and the police chief that she fired is running for the open at-large city council seat. There are 3 open seats on the council,
but in the other two seats, even the incumbents face multiple challengers. Berkeley's mayoral contest and council district 5 have open seats. San Leandro does not have
contests with more than two candidates this year.
The May 2024 special election for Berkeley city council district 3 is not shown below yet, but the results can be found on the
Registrar of Voters web page.
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 mid-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 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 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.
