East Bay Express - In the weeks before the November 4 election, numerous news stories in the mainstream press focused on whether ranked choice voting was too complicated for Oakland voters to understand. At one point, Governor Jerry Brown, an Oakland resident and a longtime opponent of RCV, called the voting system "complexifying." But results of the Oakland mayoral election strongly indicate that city voters had no trouble understanding RCV. In fact, a whopping 99.2 percent of residents who cast votes in the mayor's race filled out their ballots correctly, according to final (although still unofficial) results from the Alameda County Registrar of Voters.
The results also show that a supermajority of Oakland voters clearly understood the dynamics of this year's mayoral contest. Throughout the fall, it was clear that the top three candidates in the race were Mayor Jean Quan and Councilmembers Rebecca Kaplan and Libby Schaaf — and that one of those three was likely going to win. And sure enough, 86.1 percent of those who cast ballots in the race listed Quan, Kaplan, or Schaaf as one of their top three choices — and many listed more than one of those three candidates.
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