OAKLAND — The revelation this week of an unprecedented error in Alameda County’s counting of election results has upended an Oakland school board race. But more lasting damage could be done to the reputation of ranked choice voting, a novel “instant runoff” format that is growing in popularity around the country.
Mike Hutchinson, the third-place finisher in a race for Oakland Unified’s District 4 school board seat, was told by election officials Wednesday that he may actually have won the race due to a technical mistake in how the county’s Registrar of Voters tabulated ranked-choice results.
The mistake itself involved a simple switch — a feature in the county’s election software that was incorrectly turned on, rather than left off. As a result, ballots where a first-choice candidate was missing were incorrectly counted.
“We incorrectly had the software set so that it did not elevate those votes when there wasn’t a vote in the first-choice column,” Registrar Tim Dupuis said in an interview Wednesday. “It was an error, and after being notified we immediately took that seriously and did the research to validate it.”
County officials are scrambling to figure out the process for re-certifying election results after they were formalized Dec. 8, and Dupuis hinted that it could require legal action on the part of the candidates involved. He could not be reached Thursday for an update on what steps need to be taken for Hutchinson to be rightfully elected.
The school board race is the only one that was affected, the registrar says. But it could not come at a worse time for election officials who are trying to allay fears about the legitimacy of results provided to the public.
The debacle could particularly be a black eye for ranked-choice voting. The system allows voters to select more than one candidate for a particular race by ranking them in order of preference and redistributes votes from the lowest performers until one candidate secures majority support and is declared the winner. The system eliminates the need for a separate runoff election when no candidate gets a majority of votes.
Ironically, the error affecting Hutchinson’s totals was detected by advocacy groups working to get jurisdictions around the country to adopt the format. They noticed a discrepancy while reviewing all of Oakland’s election results, which indicated that a special category of votes wasn’t being counted until the second round of ranked-choice results. The error was also caused by a decision made by the registrar’s staff, not a flaw in the election software.
“This is a learning moment for all of us, and I think it’s crucial we maintain transparency around the process no matter what,” said Rob Richie, the CEO of FairVote, which successfully lobbied for Oakland to first implement ranked choice in the city’s 2010 elections.
Still, mistrust may grow. Ranked-choice supporters were already fending off attacks from supporters of Loren Taylor, who narrowly lost the Oakland mayor race last month after Sheng Thao won enough vote transfers from other candidates to overcome his lead in first-place ballots.
Earlier this month, Oakland’s chapter of the NAACP helped members of the public request a recount by the county registrar, but no one had enough money to foot the $21,000-a-day bill. Much of their criticisms of the process — including those from Taylor himself — fixed on the ranked-choice format.
“When you have a situation where you can vote for a second and third and so-forth candidate, it’s too confusing for the average voter without better information,” said George Holland Sr., the chapter’s president, in an interview earlier this month.
Ranked-choice voting has been adopted in Albany, Berkeley and San Leandro, as well as San Francisco, but in a vote earlier this year, San Jose officials shot down efforts to adopt the system.
“I think it makes things too complicated,” Chappie Jones, the city’s vice mayor, said at the time. “We’re trying to encourage people to come out and vote, and when you make the process more and more complicated, you’re intuitively discouraging people from participating.”
Here’s what went wrong in Oakland: The software provided by well-known elections firm Dominion Voting Systems allows cities and counties to activate a “suspended votes” feature that does not immediately count votes where the first-choice column is left blank but subsequent columns are filled.
Most cities and counties with ranked-choice elections simply “slide the votes to the left,” registering the voter’s designated second choice as their top preferred candidate, the third as their second and so on.
But when the Alameda County registrar’s office activated the “suspended votes” feature, it instead sidelined ballots missing a first-place choice until the second round of ranked choice voting was completed. Hutchison, who had the fewest first-place votes at that point, was mistakenly eliminated and did not receive any second- or third-place votes from those ballots.
As it turned out, he had enough support from those suspended votes to make it to the next round, where vote transfers from second-choice candidate Pecolia Manigo would have helped him defeat the certified winner, Nick Resnick.
“How I interpreted the phone call from (the county) was, ‘Sorry, our bad, you actually won,’ ” Hutchinson said on Wednesday after he was notified that the results had been miscounted.
Resnick, who was declared the race’s winner in last month’s final results, said Wednesday he was looking for more information about what exactly occurred.
“I received a call today with unprecedented information from the County Registrar,” he said in a text message, adding, “I have the same questions as everyone else.”
Incidentally, the registrar mistakenly activated the “suspended votes” feature in Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro elections as well, but not in Albany, which adopted the system for the first time earlier this year. It’s unclear how that happened. However, it does not appear the mistake affected the outcome of any races in those other cities.
Richie is aware of the backlash against ranked choice, acknowledging that a bevy of election terms involved — such as “overvote,” “exhausted vote” and now “suspended vote” — can confuse people, leading them to question an election’s integrity.
Ultimately, though, the burden is on a city or county to educate the public about how ranked choice saves money on runoff elections and gives voters more choices upfront, he said.
“It’s a wake-up call for people to be that much more attentive,” Richie said. “Oakland, perhaps, got into this mode of coasting after (ranked choice) had been used in a number of elections. Fundamentally, it’s working as intended.”
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