Trickle of Votes as Oakland Waits Anxiously on Recall, Local Races. Recall–Associated Candidates Performing Poorly as Recall Appears on Track to Pass

Thursday evening saw a collective crash of observer expectations, as the Alameda County Registrar of Voters [ALCO ROV] posted only a small vote count update numbering in the thousands county-wide, and in bare hundreds for the City of Oakland.

The trickle of counted votes followed a long ROV 24 hour administrative day, while residents waited anxiously to find out whether the County’s District Attorney and City’s Mayor have been recalled and down-ballot seats divvied up as spoils. While ballots were processed during the day, according to an ROV source, very few votes were published at day’s end. About 5K votes were processed county-wide. The Mayoral recount, which with its first batch of votes stands at around 65% to recall, added less than 200 votes to the total last night according to the count of this publication. In a tweet last night, the Oaklandside’s Darwin Bond Graham posted a response from the Registrar Tim Dupuis, which noted the administrative day was spent finishing walk-in voting, and the transition to processing newly returned mail in votes that have arrived since election day.

Another ROV staffer told this publication that the process is lengthy because there are 226 different types of ballots which all require separation into different counts.

This year, Dupuis has estimated an 80% county-wide voter turnout, based on previous high stakes Presidential elections turnouts. In 2020's Presidential general election, the turnout was 76% and about the same figure in 2016. This morning, the ROV updated the received mail-in votes figure to 107.5K, an increase of nearly 13K votes from the number posted Monday morning before election day. County-wide, the number is 445.6K. Those numbers will be represented as some proportion of an expected update this evening around close of business, but it’s unclear how big a tranche the update will post.

Should Dupuis' 80% turnout calculations prove correct, about 93K votes are still on their way or unprocessed at this time*.

As things stand, with a potential 24% of the votes counted and around 152K votes left to count, both recalls appear to be on their way to victory. Both ALCO DA Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao have asked the public to allow the process to play out—though straight odds are against them. Thao's anti-recall campaign sent out this email last night.

Thao would need around 54 to 56% of the rest of the count to beat the recall if something near Dupuis’ projected vote count comes in, 70 to 80%. Historically, later tranches of votes—signifying voters who mailed in their ballots later and even on election day—tend to be further to the left than those received by the election day cut off. This later progression toward the left in the vote count is what was responsible for eventually giving Thao the Mayor’s office in the first place in later updates that went against her then challenger, Loren Taylor. But the distance is much larger in this gap and a win much less likely.

Despite the recall’s initial positive results, candidates linked to it by recall funding and by the organizations much of the funders were aligned with, Empower Oakland [EO] and Foundational Oakland Unites [FOU], seem to be experiencing the opposite math.

—In D1, FOU's former Treasurer, Len Raphael is trailing Zac Unger by too great a margin to recover. FOU endorsed Raphael for the seat. EO endorsed Unger on paper. But EO's founder later used his email list serve to endorse Raphael. Raphael intimated in social media posts that Taylor's email endorsement and the "lackluster" endorsement by EO for Unger indicated the Unger endorsement was disingenuous. Raphael has about 16% of the vote.

—For City Attorney, Brenda Harbin-Forte, the former public face of the recall and principal in its millions-dollar finance committee is underwater against Ryan Richardson. Harbin-Forte was backed by both FOU and EO. She is currently about 10 points behind.

—In D3, current RCV projections give the race to Carroll Fife with a wide margin over Warren Logan, who is backed by Chris Moore, the current Treasurer of FOU. Logan was EO's endorsement for the seat as well as FOU's. RCV projections currently show her winning by 13 points, but again, especially in RCV, that can change.

Both groups backed Noel Gallo, who was always the only favorite to win the seat, who appears to be far in the lead. In D7, EO backed Iris Merriouns and Ken Houston while FOU backed Houston. This is the only race where the candidate appears competitive and currently beats Merriouns in RCV projections.

More to come on all this as the numbers become more stable—things can always change, but if tonight's output is big enough, it should answer many questions.

*State of California’s current Unpocessed Ballot Totals are usually a day behind the Registrar’s updates. The current County total is based on ballots received by election day as of 1am on Wednesday for the County.