Berkeley’s tight race for mayor: When will we know the winner?

A close race between Councilmember Sophie Hahn and nonprofit consultant Adena Ishii, combined with the slow trickle of results from Alameda County officials, means it’s still far from clear who Berkeley’s next mayor will be one week after Election Day.

The batch of results released Monday afternoon showed Hahn continued to lead Ishii, but her advantage shrank considerably: Ishii trailed Hahn by less than 400 votes once ranked-choice votes were taken into account, down from a deficit of just over 1,000 votes in a tally released late Friday. Ishii also narrowed Hahn’s advantage in first-place votes.

And that’s where the race is set to stay for the next several days, because the Alameda County Registrar of Voters’ Office says it isn’t planning to release another batch of results until the end of the week.

Registrar Tim Dupuis wrote in an email to Berkeleyside that his office plans to spend this week working to process “difficult ballots,” such as those that were cast conditionally or not marked correctly, then deliver a “major update” on Friday. Dupuis’ office has faced renewed scrutiny this month for the pace of its ballot count, which in the days after the election was one of the slowest in California.

There are 187,135 ballots left to process county-wide, according to election officials, which represents about 28% of votes cast. A key question is how many of those remaining ballots are from Berkeley; Monday’s update captured 36,786 total votes in the mayor’s race, which four years ago saw about 60,000 votes cast.

The county has until Dec. 5, one month after Election Day, to certify the results.

Former Councilmember Kate Harrison continues to run well behind the top two, with 8,237 first-choice votes as of Monday, compared to 13,630 for Ishii and 14,263 for Hahn.

Harrison’s supporters appear likely to decide to race, however. With neither Hahn nor Ishii close to winning support from more than half of voters, the outcome could come down to who Harrison voters picked as their second choices.

They have not had a clear preference so far: The latest update showed Harrison supporters were almost evenly split between Ishii and Hahn, with Ishii picking up slightly more than half of the available votes but not enough to erase Hahn’s lead in first-place votes. None of the campaigns in the mayor’s race directly encouraged their supporters to pick one of their opponents as a second choice, a strategy candidates sometimes deploy in cities with ranked-choice voting.