Alameda County's Registrar of Voters released another update yesterday afternoon—at about 3 pm rather than end of business, keeping with the agency's reputation for unpredictability.
With 80% voter turnout during the last two presidential elections—and Registrar Tim Dupuis predicting at least 80% turnout this time—it’s unknown how many votes remain to be processed, but there may ultimately be 180 to 200K turnout in Oakland's November, 2024 election. The Registrar now says that it has received 149.3K city as of Monday night. But the ROV has only counted at total of about 110K since last Friday. That's about 34K of the 65K ballots it had counted by last Friday.
Latter tranches of votes come are showing lower support for the Mayoral recall, but that likely won't be enough to turn the tide. The latest batch itself of about 33.4K recall focused votes has a lower level of support than the initial batches—43% against vs 57%. But the total gap, while shrinking, is still large: on Friday that gap was 63.8% vs 36.15%, as of Monday it was 61.59% vs 38.41%. With 99K counted, this could be around half the votes with 70-80% turnout, but that final number is still unknown.
Interestingly, matching the counted votes in the recall with Oakland's measures vote count—all three of which are succeeding with over 70% of the vote—shows that voters could be skipping the recall question. While the recall shows a total of 99k votes counted as of Monday, another City wide electoral question, Measure NN, shows a total of 110K counted. This could mean that many voters skipped the recall question, but it could be just a function of ongoing ballot counting.
Residents will have to wait until Friday to get some finally definitive answers to some of these contests.
At-Large: Brown Still Pulling Ahead of Armstrong, in Up Front Votes as well as RCV
Relative newcomer Rowena Brown pulled ahead of Leronne Armstrong in straight votes, and is way ahead in RCV as of Monday's count—they were tied in up front votes on Friday, but she's added a point lead since there, and also another point in an 13 point lead in RCV. The trend of Brown getting a huge number of Wang's votes, despite Loren Taylor's Empower Oakland recommending an LA/Wang slate continues: Brown gets about half of Wang's votes, and that's double Armstrong's share. The trend of Wang's votes going in majority to Brown in the RCV has been consistent.
Recall Funding Conduit Raphael's Vote Share Continues to Drop in D1
Things are worse for Dreyfuss' bag man for the recall, Len Raphael, losing votes with each update. He was at 15.19% Friday in straight votes, now 14.92%. He actually benefits in RCV from getting a few hundred of Frank's votes, boosting his share to 16.78% to Unger at 83.2%, but that's also a half point increase in favor of Unger since the last results were dropped.
Logan's Share of Votes Dropping in Likely Landslide Loss to Fife in D3
Fife now has a front end 46.39% of the vote before RCV, that's up from 44.85%—about 14 points ahead of next nearest challenger, Logan. She may actually win outright without RCV if progression continues. With RCV, she continues to outpace Logan, but has only added a half point there. On top of having more votes, she gets a lot of RCV help Logan was likely expecting from Afolabi and Hailey, who ran against her and not Logan as a potential slate. With a big lead to start, she's sapping those votes that Logan would have needed to catch up. RCV linkage is where a challenger would have hoped to cobble together the votes to unseat a popular incumbent like Fife, but it's done him little good. Almost a year of constant ugly attacks by Logan's supporters on social media platforms, who are also linked to the Thao and Price recalls, did him no good as well.
No surprises in D5: Gallo Will Remain the District's CM
D7 Race Heating Up as Merriouns Gains Ground
Iris Merriouns is closing the gap against Ken Houston, both with up front votes, and in RCV. She's gained almost 3 points up front, and she's gained two points in RCV. If progression continues, she has a shot at winning, upending what appeared to be a likely victory for Houston as of Friday. Merriouns is only a point and a half behind in the up front vote. In RCV she's up about two points, but still about five points behind there with many votes left to count.
Recall's Public Face, Harbin-Forte, Continues to Lose Ground to Richardson for City Attorney
Hundreds of thousands in tech, venture capital, police union and coal money isn't helping the public-face of the recall, Brenda Harbin-Forte. She was already way behind, but lost ground since Friday against Ryan Richardson. Ironically, the recall final count may be the complete reversal of her race for City Attorney. It's possible voters never had enough information to put the two together.
Bas Gaining Ground on Bauters in ALCO D5
Though Bauters win seemed likely last Friday, the Monday dump shows Bas is still in the race. She's a little less than 4 points behind with quite a lot of votes left to count. The electoral map shows she's doing well in Oakland, but not in more conservative county-wide area. She was about 7 points behind last week.
Price Recall Falls Slightly, but Still Likely
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