The Registrar of Voters published the first batch of results on Election Night just after 8 p.m. A a few more updates are expected this evening and the registrar will run the rank-choice runoffs before stopping the count for the night.
The registrar’s team plans to continue counting ballots Tuesday through Friday but won’t publish another update until April 18.
- The race for mayor is very close. It could be Friday or even longer before we know the winner
- Either Loren Taylor or Barbara Lee could win — it all depends on whether the ballots left to be counted lean in one or another’s favor
- If Taylor can’t gain another two points to surpass 50% of the vote after all the votes are counted, then ranked choice will determine the winner
- In 2022, Taylor lost despite leading Sheng Thao by more than a point in the first round. His lead this time was bigger — four points, but it fell to 2.8 when the second vote tally was published after 9 p.m.
- After ranked-choice is run, Taylor has a roughly two point lead
- In D2, Charlene Wang has a big lead over Kara Murray-Badal, the second place candidate. Even if the remaining ballots lean heavily in Murray-Badal’s favor it will be extremely difficult for her to overtake Wang
- Ranked choice runoff expands Wang’s lead to 66%
- Measure A looks set to pass
- 49,042 ballots have been counted so far. Tens of thousands more remain to be counted. But turnout is expected to be low. There are roughly 250,000 registered voters in Oakland
Patience, patience, patience.
A quick note on how we’re presenting the results: Oakland uses ranked-choice voting. For RCV races, we display the total votes each candidate got in the first round of voting and their percentage of first-round votes in the first two columns of each table. The third and fourth columns, “ranked choice votes” and “% ranked-choice votes,” display the vote count and percent after all the elimination and vote redistribution rounds, ending with the top two candidates.
A map showing where candidates in the mayor’s race are picking up votes reveals a starkly divided Oakland. Loren Taylor’s base of support is in the hills, while Barbara Lee is picking up more votes in the flatlands and North Oakland.
A map of Oakland’s election precincts reveals that Barbara Lee is picking up more votes than any other candidate in Oakland’s flatlands and much of North Oakland while Loren Taylor has support from hills precincts stretching all the way from Berkeley to San Leandro. Source: Alameda County Registrar of Voters
