Update, Monday, Nov. 14, 5:43 p.m. Cheryl Davila has increased her lead in City Council District 2, from 50.77% Friday to 50.82% Monday. Nearly 100 votes now separate her from incumbent Darryl Moore after Nanci Armstrong-Temple’s votes were allocated to each candidate. The Registrar of Voters continued until today to accept ballots postmarked by Tuesday, Nov. 8, but Davila has increased her lead each time votes are tallied and the ranked-choice voting algorithm runs.
Since Friday, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters has tallied at least 13,100 more Berkeley ballots. Roughly 53,000 have been tallied total from the city.
Update, 6:15 p.m. After the ranked-choice algorithm ran, District 2 candidate Cheryl Davila’s lead increased slightly, from 50.58% early Wednesday morning to 50.77% on Friday evening, or 2,200 votes to incumbent Darryl Moore’s 2,133. Davila’s lead increased from 42 to 67 votes. In 2012, voters in District 2 cast about 5,800 votes, meaning there could be another 1,400 or so votes still to count in the race, if the past is any indication.
Overall turnout for the county is up 5 points to about 49%. The Registrar of Voters has estimated there are still about 212,000 votes to count in Alameda County, with about 437,000 already counted. Overall turnout would end up around 73% if his estimates prove accurate.
Update, 5:36 p.m. Still waiting for the RCV calculations in District 2 and the mayoral race (though that one is unlikely to change). None of the measures shifted much percentage-wise, though the totals represent more than 5,400 new Berkeley ballots.
Update, 5:10 p.m. The ROV’s office tells Berkeleyside those new calculations are forthcoming: “We are still running the RCV algorithm. It takes another 30 to 45 minutes before we can post the RCV results.”
None of the other candidate races have really changed percentage-wise, despite hundreds of new ballots. We’ll take a quick look at the measures now. Not expecting any big shifts. If the mayor’s race is any indication, more than 5,400 new Berkeley ballots were part of the tallies released Friday.
Update, 4:50 p.m. Unofficial totals for Berkeley’s District 2 race have increased by about 740 votes, but the standings remain the same: Darryl Moore with about 40% of the votes, and Cheryl Davila and Nanci Armstrong-Temple each with about 30%. The ranked-choice results do not appear to have updated yet, despite an updated timestamp. (An earlier version of this story has been corrected.)
The total turnout for Alameda County is now 436,916 (49% turnout), meaning nearly 46,000 additional ballots have been counted since early Wednesday morning.
In 2014, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters (ROV) was able to tally about 60,500 additional ballots by the Friday update following Election Day.
The ROV will continue to tally all ballots received through Monday that were postmarked by Election Day, Nov. 8. Usually, the cutoff would have been Friday, three days after the election, but the Veterans Day holiday pushed the deadline ahead.
Following Friday’s update, ROV Tim Dupuis said he plans to provide regular updates next week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Nov. 18. The ROV plans to post all updates between 4:30 and 5 p.m. Berkeleyside will continue to post those, too.
We’ll have a look at the other races now, too. Stay tuned. Scroll down for the original story with much more background about the Nov. 8 election.
Original story, Nov. 11, 10:30 a.m. The Alameda County Registrar of Voters (ROV) is expected to release new election results Friday between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. Berkeleyside will post the results right here.
The ROV estimates there are about 257,750 unprocessed vote-by-mail and provisional ballots in Alameda County. Some 391,000 ballot have been counted already, which brings the estimated total for the county to 648,915, a 73% turnout rate.
No official estimates for Berkeley have been run. But, historically, Berkeley has made up 10% to 11% of the county total according to election results reviewed by Berkeleyside dating back to 2006.
With roughly 34,200 ballots counted so far, that could mean tallies from another 30,000 ballots — or more — are coming Berkeley’s way.
Most of the Berkeley races and ballot measures appear to have been won by wide enough margins that a wave of new ballots won’t make much difference. But the District 2 race, between incumbent Darryl Moore and challengers Nanci Armstrong-Temple and Cheryl Davila, had Davila on top by just 42 votes after the first ranked-choice voting (RCV) calculation was run early Wednesday morning.
As of 1:40 a.m., when the ROV posted the most recent unofficial results, Moore had secured 40% of the vote, or 1,545 ballots. Because he failed to get more than 50%, RCV came into play.
Armstrong-Temple, in the bottom slot by about 80 votes, was knocked out, and her votes were divided between Moore and Davila, according to voter preference. That pushed Davila ahead, with 1,838 votes to Moore’s 1,796. But ranked-choice voting could mean a different outcome altogether.
In 2012, voters in District 2 cast about 5,800 votes, meaning there could be another 2,000 ballots at play if that election offers any clues. And turnout this year is estimated to be even higher than it was then, according to the ROV. But if the current batch of votes is a representative sample, don’t expect big changes.
The only other potentially close race in Berkeley appeared to be one seat on the Rent Stabilization Board, with Judy J. Hunt trailing Igor Tregub by nearly 2,600 votes, or about 3% of the vote.
Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis said Wednesday the number of vote-by-mail ballots requested for the Nov. 8 election set a record for the county. He said about 67% of county voters now vote by mail.
There were 888,709 people registered to vote in time for Tuesday’s election. (As a point of reference, 10 years ago, there were nearly 680,000 total registered voters in the county.) The unofficial turnout at this time is 44%.
According to the Secretary of State’s office, “In processing vote-by-mail ballots, elections officials must confirm each voter’s registration status, verify each voter’s signature on the vote-by-mail envelope, and ensure each person did not vote elsewhere in the same election before the ballot can be counted.”
Also still to count are the provisional ballots, as well as damaged ballots or others that “cannot be machine-read and must be remade by elections officials,” the SOS reports.
The 257,750 unprocessed ballots in Alameda County include an estimated 52,000 provisional ballots. Dupuis told Berkeleyside last week that prior-year provisional numbers were not readily available.
One poll worker told Berkeleyside that provisional ballots seemed to have been much higher than usual during the June primary, but Dupuis said he could not confirm that.
Sign up for our infrequent breaking news alerts to get informed fast.
After the update, the ranked-choice calculation will be run for the cities that use that process: Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro.
Dupuis told Berkeleyside last week that, even with such a high vote-by-mail percentage, Alameda County is so diverse that “every vote counts.”
He continued: “You have to wait until all the last votes come in. You can’t say the race is called on Election Night, even when all the precincts are in.”
Despite that admonition, the standings in other Berkeley races appear unlikely to change, with Ben Bartlett currently taking District 3 with 57% of the vote, Sophie Hahn taking District 5 with 62%, and Susan Wengraf retaining her seat in District 6 with 61%. More than 1,000 votes could still be at play in all of those races, which each has about 4,000 to 5,600 votes tallied so far.
According to Robert Gammon, of Oakland Magazine, BART bond Measure RR is another close one for the region. It has about 70% of the vote and needs 66.67% to prevail.
At the time of the June primary, Berkeley had 79,232 registered voters, and a turnout of about 58%.
All results are unofficial until certified by the ROV, which has until Dec. 8 to do so.
See complete 2016 election coverage on Berkeleyside.
Related:
Arreguín becomes mayor, progressives seize council majority (11.09.16)
Tune in here to Berkeleyside’s 2016 election live blog (11.08.16.)
News analysis: Who will control Berkeley’s City Council post-election? (11.08.16)
That’s right, Berkeley, you can vote in person now (11.02.16)
Berkeleyside publishes many articles every day. To see all our stories in chronological order, and read ones you may have missed, check out our All the News grid.