Election error could flip Oakland school board race to third-place finisher Mike Hutchinson

OAKLAND — The Alameda County Registrar of Voters has notified Mike Hutchinson, who finished third place last month in the District 4 Oakland Unified school board race, that he may actually have won the election after all.

Tim Dupuis, the county registrar, confirmed Wednesday that an error in the ranked choice voting algorithm threw out 235 ballots where no one selected a first-choice candidate but did fill out second-choice or later categories.

Counting those ballots erases a 41-vote margin separating Hutchinson from second-place finisher Pecolia Manigo, and subsequent ranked choice vote transfers push Hutchinson ahead of Nick Resnick, whom the county on Dec. 8 certified as the race’s winner.

“This was a complete shock and surprise to get this information,” Hutchinson said in an interview. “This did not come from my campaign — I never challenged anything, even when I finished only 41 votes behind.”

Hutchinson, the current District 5 director on the school board, is looking to obtain a lawyer to challenge the results of the race.

“The issue is we still have to work through how to re-certify (the election) given what we’ve discovered,” Dupuis said. “We have to work this out through the election code.”

Oakland’s city charter requires that ranked choice ballots are counted even if no one is selected as a first-choice candidate, so long as second- or later-choice columns are filled.

Dupuis said the county did not follow this method, instead discarding those votes as “suspended” ballots.

The error may lend further scrutiny to the city’s ranked choice voting format, which came under fire after a tight city mayor’s race was decided by just a few hundred votes.

This story will be updated.