Tuesday, November 9, 2010
BREAKING NEWS: No Results Tuesday in Oakland Mayor's Race
Breaking News Robert Gammon — Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 2:33 PM
The Alameda County Registrar of Voters likely will not post updated results today in the Oakland mayor's race because it's still not done counting provisional ballots.
Update 2:38 p.m.: Spokesman Guy Ashley said that there are "hundreds" of provisional ballots still to count. The registrar's office hopes to finish counting them by tomorrow. Thursday is a county holiday — it's Veteran's Day.
Update 2:44 p.m.: Just to be clear, the delays in posting results are being caused by the laborious process of counting provisional ballots. These ballots are cast by voters who show up at a polling station on Election Day but their names are not on the official roster for that location. It took ten days to count them all in the 2006 Oakland mayor's election. The reason is that each ballot must be checked to see if it was cast by a registered voter. The signatures on the ballots also must be validated against the registrar's official records. The ballots also must be checked to make sure they were cast in the proper district. For example, if a voter in District 6 shows up at a District 4 polling station, they're not allowed to vote in the District 4 council race.
Update 2:51 p.m.: The count also is slow because representatives from the Don Perata and Jean Quan campaigns are on hand, watching the counting and asking questions of the counters about whether some ballots should be added to the totals or thrown out because of some defect. Perata, whose campaign is still flush with cash, has had up to three reps there, while Quan, who has depended on volunteers, has usually had one. The Rebecca Kaplan campaign has sometimes had a monitor there, too.
Update 3:05 p.m.: The registrar does not plan to post updated results until all the provisionals are counted. At that point, the registrar will run the ranked choice tabulation to determine who won the election. Running the computer tabulation typically only takes a couple of minutes. It's as simple as hitting a few key strokes and pressing enter. But the registrar decided not to post updates every day after contcerns were raised about displaying results that show candidates being eliminated from the race before all the ballots are in.
However, ranked choice voting advocates note that the candidates aren't really eliminated until the vote counting is over, and that the updates are just snapshots of the race as it currently stands. They also contend that the registrar should be posting these snapshot updates every day — even if the ballots aren't all counted — and that it should have begun on Election Night. They note that if the registrar had done that, then voters would have realized that the race was close from the beginning and that there never really was a clear frontrunner.
Comments (5)
Showing 1-5 of 5
It's all so pathetic - as Oakland is. Leave it to the smart people, to understand 'how' to vote -and who to vote for (all it takes is basic reading) - and then now....after the count for "no one we desire" , leave it to "the connected people" to decide, oops, now we have to pay attention and try to influence - we are a 'laughing stock' of the system.
Here's to those who try to be informed - and are right.
(20 yr. resident)
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While I’m as anxious as anyone (except Steve Bloom) to see the results unfold, I can understand the registrar’s reluctance to feed stories about candidate X being eliminated and later have that candidate declared the winner. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that The Don and his uncontrolled committees are sitting around plotting ways to undermine the RCV process. But sometimes a delay is just a delay.
Steve Bloom is absolutely right. The excuse for not releasing updated results daily is lame to the extreme.
Refusing to provide daily updates makes it look like there is something inherent in RCV that prevents it, when there simply isn't. No election, RCV or otherwise, is official until all the votes are counted, but the public has the right to daily updated unofficial results.
"But the registrar decided not to post updates every day after contcerns were raised about displaying results that show candidates being eliminated from the race before all the ballots are in."
Bob, I don't get why it's not clear to you what utter nonsense this is. The exact same thing happens with non-ranked choiuce elections all the time, indeed is happening as we speak with the AG's race and is common enough in local races, and yet no one, least of all Dave McDonald, argues in favor of not releasing all results until the count is final. It's bad enough that he expects people to believe that silliness, but it's even worse that you seem to have bought it. The much more likely reason is that one or more politically influential Friend of Don decided to lean on McDonald so that news of the loss wouldn't get repeated so much and so stick more in the memories of voters.
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