OAKLAND — Supporters of Loren Taylor, the mayoral candidate who fell just short of the city’s top office in last month’s election, have not quieted down in questioning Mayor-Elect Sheng Thao’s victory by fewer than 700 ranked choice votes.

The Oakland NAACP this week is publicly supporting calls for a recount, but no one appears to have formally requested the Alameda County Registrar of Voters carry one out. It’s an expensive process that would require re-tabulating the ballots cast in the Nov. 8 race.

Taylor, who conceded the nail-biter race in a press conference last month, said at the time he did not intend to pursue a recount himself but wouldn’t object to someone else doing so.

Rumblings have swirled around a possible recount effort after the registrar last month took nearly two weeks to finish processing all the ballots, leaving Thao with about an 0.55% ranked choice vote margin over Taylor when all the dust had settled.

Thao will be sworn in the first week of January.

She is the second mayor-elect to win the race without securing more first-place votes than her opponent — instead receiving enough vote transfers from other candidates, and in particular Allyssa Victory, whose supporters largely listed Thao as their second choice.

In California, there isn’t a margin small enough to trigger an automatic recount. A voter or committee must request it themselves, and, importantly, be able to pay for it.

Oakland NAACP President George Holland Sr. said Wednesday the chapter is receiving contributions from members of the community to pay for a recount. But he declined to estimate how much money has come in, adding that the chapter itself won’t put up any money for the process.

Taylor has fueled some of the consternation around the election’s outcome, using his concession speech last month to say the city’s ranked choice voting format is “not working” and suggesting that voters’ voices had been suppressed because of disqualified ballots.

The format, used in Oakland for the past four mayoral elections, allows voters to rank up to five preferences and transfers those ranked votes between candidates if no one immediately secures majority support.

Other jurisdictions will typically hold two elections — a primary that whittles a crowded field to two frontrunner candidates and then a runoff between them. The ranked choice format creates an instant runoff where voters list their preferences outright, saving the city time and money.

But Holland, in an interview, said voters have not sufficiently been educated about how the format works, leading some to unintentionally sabotage their own ballots. In past elections voters could choose three candidates, ranking them as their first, second or third choice. In this election, voters were allowed five choices.

“Voting is so important that saving money should not be our ultimate concern,” Holland said. “You should be able to only vote for one person at a time and decide who you wish to have as the city’s leader.”

The ranked choice format does not require voters to list more than one preferred candidate. But last month’s mayoral race saw more than 3,000 disqualified “overvotes,” or ballots that weren’t counted because voters listed more than one candidate in the same choice column rather than placing their second, third, fourth or fifth choices in the appropriate columns.

The race reminded many voters of the 2010 Oakland mayoral contest — the first time the ranked choice system was used. Jean Quan similarly bested Don Perata through ranked choice ballot transfers despite having fewer first-place votes. There were 526 overvotes cast in that race.

Steve Hill, an election expert with FairVote who supports ranked choice voting, noted that overvotes “happen in every election.” He cited data that indicates a similar percentage of discounted ballots — because voters filled them out incorrectly — in elections that don’t use ranked choice.

“Loren Taylor was elected by RCV four years ago for city council and he didn’t have a problem with it then, or think that it was voter suppression,” Hill said.