2010 Oakland mayoral election

The 2010 Oakland mayoral election was held on November 2, 2010 to elect the mayor of Oakland, California. It saw the election of Jean Quan.

The election was held using instant-runoff voting. It was the first Oakland election run using this system.

Background
The city of Oakland, California, passed (69%) a measure in November 2006 to adopt RCV for 18 city offices. In early August 2010, incumbent mayor Ron Dellums announced that he would not be seeking reelection to a second term. In November 2010, Oakland used RCV to elect its mayor, three city council races and four other local offices, with elections for mayor and council district four requiring multiple rounds of counting. It used RCV in the city's remaining elected offices in 2012. IRV was again used in 2014 and 2016, including in the 2014 mayoral election in which incumbent Jean Quan was defeated by Libby Schaaf.

2010 mayoral election
Oakland's 2010 mayoral election was an open-seat election in which no candidate earned more than 34% of votes in the first round. In the tally, candidates were eliminated sequentially, with three candidates far ahead in first choices. After the count of first choices, Don Perata was in first place, Jean Quan in second place, and Rebecca Kaplan in third place. They remained in that order of votes after all other candidates were eliminated and their votes re-allocated. When Kaplan was then eliminated, Quan picked up 18,864 votes from Kaplan backers while Perata was the next choice of only 6,407 Kaplan backers. As a result, Quan won a final round majority when matched against Perata, which means she was ranked ahead of Perata on a majority of ballots in which one of them received a ranking.(11% of voters did not rank either of them, making their votes exhausted by the time of the final round.)

2012 elections
Oakland used RCV for several elections in 2012, including a citywide election for city attorney and for several seats on the city council and school board. Several races were decided after multiple rounds, including the District 3 city council race where the winner trailed in first choices. Of the 18 Oakland offices elected by RCV in 2010 and 2012, sixteen of the RCV winners received more votes than the previous winner had won before adoption in the last non-RCV election