As an Oakland resident, Oakland voter, ranked choice voting advocate, and poll worker for the November election, I feel the need to clarify a few things here:

1. "exhausted ballots":  yes, these are ballots for which all the choices have been eliminated.  This includes ballot on which the voter chose only one candidate; it is not a requirement to vote for three candidates.

2. The movement of Kaplan's votes to Quan: for people who followed the election closely, this is not a big surprise. There was a strong "anybody but Perata" campaign in Oakland in which several of the other candidates banded together and said, in essence, choose us in any order, but don't vote for Perata. The other piece of this is that people either really like Perata, or really don't like him.

3. Perata not understanding RCV: Mr. Perata is a smart man. He heard the explanation of RCV more times than I did at the candidate forums. It is not a hard system to understand, and all the voters at my polling place understood it quite well, without hearing the explanation as many times as Mr. Perata did. I find his claims of not understanding the system disingenuous.

4. The consistent preference for Quan over Perata by Kaplan supporters: see # 2 above. For those of us steeped in Oakland politics, it is quite easy to understand.

Helen Hutchison

From: election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu [mailto:election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Hess
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 8:00 AM
To: election-law
Subject: [EL] Oakland Mayor's race "pass report"

The "pass report" for the mayor's race in Oakland is an interesting document and provides some insight into what happened. Here is the link to the pass report: http://www.acgov.org/rov/rcv/results/OaklandMayor/pass_report.pdf

Essentially, if you look at page 19, you see that the race was 40% to 31% to 29% for Perata, Quan, and Kaplan. Kaplan's voters (who hadn't over voted, under voted, or "exhausted" their ballot--which I assume means they ranked 2nd and 3rd candidates that had already been eliminated in prior passes) overwhelmingly supported Quan: Quan picked up ~18,800 votes that way to Perata's ~6,400  (see page 20). 

Perata said on election night "I don't understand how ranked-choice voting works" (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/10/MNKV1GADKC.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea ). May be that was an off hand remark, but he needed a campaign to convince more people who didn't back Quan or Kaplan to make him their 2nd choice. Maybe he tried and failed. In any event, he came up about 1,000 votes short. (E.g., if Perata have convinced more of Joe Tuman's supporters to back him over Quan-Kaplan, he would have won...Tuman's unexhausted passed on ballots were fairly split between Perata and Quan, see page 18.)

So the real surprise is that such a consistent preference for Quan among Kaplan supporters existed (the campaign dynamic that produced the result). It seems to me, not having followed the race, that this would point to a savy campaign from Quan, or at least a very similar set of politics (or a shared distain for Perata?) between Quan and Kaplan supporters that their camps understood and ran on.

Doug Hess