The Cost of a Miscount: Lessons from the 2022 Oakland School Board Election
by Adam Trinklein
Although ranked choice voting (RCV or Instant Runoff Voting) is used in more than 50 jurisdictions (as of April 2025), sometimes, counting ranked choice ballots can go wrong. There can be confusing rules about how different ballots are supposed to be counted or interpreted. During the 2022 Oakland Union School District 4 election, an error interpreting ballots led to the incorrect winner being determined by the registrar, announced to the public, and certified by the city council.
The three candidates running in this school board election split the vote pretty evenly. According to the initial tally, which was later found to not be configured properly, Nick Resnick received 38% of the first place votes, Pecolia Manigo received 31.1% of the first choice votes, and Mike Hutchinson received 30.9% of the first choice votes. Because Hutchinson received the least amount of first choice votes, his votes were redistributed to the other candidates. This led to Nick Resnick achieving the majority threshold at 51.2% of the vote, and being declared the winner by the registrar.
The results were certified by the city council before the error was recognized by FairVote, and only a judge could overturn the outcome. When Mike Hutchinson challenged the results, it went to court, where it was eventually recognized that votes had incorrectly been tabulated. As it had turned out, 235 voters had left the first choice blank, but filled out votes in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th slots. The instant runoff voting algorithm should have bumped each of these votes up to first, second, and third choice, but did not do so as a result of a simple human error. This led to Mike Hutchinson unfairly being eliminated. When the runoff was recalculated by the registrar, it showed Hutchinson actually placed second by a slim margin over Manigo. The votes from Manigo, when redistributed, went mostly to Hutchinson who was correctly recognized as the winner of the election.
Resnick resigned from the school board, and Hutchinson assumed the position. Although everything was sorted out in the end, four months and community tax dollars were spent trying to fix errors that went initially unnoticed.
One lesson to be learned from the 2022 Oakland school board election is that there should be clear instructions in place to handle how voters fill out rankings on ALL ballots. It also demonstrates that how ballots are interpreted can impact results. In the case of the 2022 Oakland School District election, because the contest was so close among three candidates, a small change in the algorithm changed the outcome of who won. Unlike IRV, under Consensus Choice Voting there are no elimination rounds. The rankings on the ballot are converted into expressed preferences in head-to-head matchups. An error like this would have been mitigated using Consensus Choice Voting.
To prevent errors like the one that occurred in the Oakland school district race, we need a voting system where the counting process is transparent and clear for election administrators and the broader public.
Consensus Choice Voting allows for precinct summability and for voters to see real-time tabulations. When voters express their preferences by ranking candidates, the voter’s rankings are used to determine the winner of each candidate head-to-head matchup.
Consensus Choice also doesn’t have elimination rounds like IRV does. Instead, all the candidates are compared one-on-one under Consensus Choice and the winning candidate is the candidate who defeats every other candidate head-to-head. This ensures that a candidate isn’t prematurely eliminated, which can occur under IRV.
Learn more about the advantages of Consensus Choice in our FAQs and join us to help implement this better way to (rank) vote.
