I Have Never Heard of Anything Like This Before: How the Mayoral Race Will Be Determined in Oakland

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Oakland city councilwoman Libby Schaaf took an early lead in the Oakland mayor’s race, outpacing 14 other candidates in early returns Tuesday evening in a contest that could take several days to sort out.

Schaaf had 28.4 percent of the vote with about 17 percent of precincts reporting. She was followed by Mayor Jean Quan, with 17.1 percent and Joe Tuman, with 14.6 percent. Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan was in fourth place. None of the candidates had the necessary 50-plus percent of the vote to win the race outright so an instant runoff will take place later this evening after all of the precinct votes have been counted.

And, as Oakland learned in 2010, just because a person receives the most first-place votes doesn’t mean he or she will win. Just ask then-favorite Don Perata, who lost the race — in which he had held the lead through several rounds — to Quan.

Under ranked-choice voting, if none of the candidates gets more than 50 percent of the first-place votes, then the last-place candidate is eliminated and his or her second-and-third place votes are distributed. This process continues until one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes...

The three with the fewest votes in the early going were Saied Karamooz, Nancy Sidebotham and Eric Wilson. Assuming things don’t change by the time the last precinct is counted, their votes will be the first to be redistributed.

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters was expecting to complete the ranked-choice tallying by Wednesday morning, but that won’t be the end of things. Poll workers will then have to count the thousands of vote-by-mail ballots dropped at polling places on election day — a tedious process that could last days, said Tim Dupuis, the county registrar.

According to Wikipedia:

Instant runoff voting is used to elect members of the Australian House of Representatives and most Australian State Governments, the President of India, members of legislative councils in India, the President of Ireland and the parliament in Papua New Guinea. It is also used in Northern Ireland by-elections and for electing hereditary peers for the British House of Lords.

The system is also used in local elections around the world: to elect the mayor in cities such as London in the United Kingdom (in the variant known as supplementary vote) and Dunedin and Wellington in New Zealand. Variations of instant-runoff voting are employed by several jurisdictions in the United States, including San Francisco, San Leandro, and Oakland in California; Portland, Maine; Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota. The single transferable vote, a multi-seat form of IRV, is used in Cambridge, Massachusetts.