Latest results in close East Bay elections raise familiar question: Are recounts coming?

By some breathtakingly narrow margins, candidates in local Bay Area elections began to emerge victorious Wednesday after new results drew several tight races closer to a final outcome.

The latest returns indicated that Nikki Fortunato Bas is likely to prevail in a race for an Alameda County Supervisor seat, Adena Ishii was poised to become Berkeley’s next mayor, and Raymond Liu was slightly ahead in a Fremont City Council race.

Fifteen days after election night, the decisive advantages in the county and Berkeley races are likely to hold even after election officials try to cure up to 4,836 additional ballots cast with improper signatures. The razor-thin race in Fremont could still flip in either direction.

In the South Bay, two packed races for city council seats in Palo Alto and Cupertino already are headed to an automatic recount Monday because their margins are tight enough to trigger an automatic second round of vote-tallying under Santa Clara County law.

Those recounts are set to go despite new results Wednesday showing Keith Reckdahl ahead by just 13 votes — 0.02% — over Doria Summa in Palo Alto, while Ray Wang led Rod Sinks by a margin of 0.15%.

In the East Bay, recounts are ordered only when members of the public request them, and they can be expensive. Whereas Santa Clara County foots the bill for its automatic recounts, the costly burden in Alameda County falls on the ones making the requests.

That could raise eyebrows this year in the East Bay, with just 36 votes — 0.32% — separating Liu and Teresa Cox in Fremont’s District 6, which includes neighborhoods between Stevenson Boulevard, Osgood Road and Auto Mall Parkway.

The two candidates have exchanged microscopic leads several times since Nov. 5. Cox, who trailed by just 12 votes before Wednesday’s results, declined to comment on whether she’d pursue a recount if the race doesn’t go her way but said she’s “prayerful” the outcome lands in her favor.

Liu, a software engineer and graduate of UC Davis and Ohlone Community College, was more direct.

“I’m a grassroots candidate, and I quite simply do not have the cash in hand,” he said in an interview ahead of the new returns.

The campaigns for Bas and John Bauters, on the other hand, respectively spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their battle for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. The seat in District 5 represents Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Piedmont and western and northern areas of Oakland.

Bas, the Oakland City Council president, had trailed since election night, but surged back in later returns, taking a 106-vote lead late last week over Bauters, a councilmember in Emeryville. Her advantage expanded to 415 votes in Wednesday’s results. She then declared victory.

Ishii, a political newcomer in Berkeley, also took the lead in the city’s mayoral race over Sophie Hahn after initially trailing. Ishii was ahead after Wednesday by over 1,000 ranked-choice votes, or 2.12%.

“The votes have been counted, and it looks like our lead has held,” Ishii said. “There are still some left to be cured, but I’m ready to get to work.”

The two South Bay races in play did not involve ranked-choice or even district-based voting. Rather, voters chose four council members from a group of nine candidates in Palo Alto and two winners from seven prospects in Cupertino.

Only a few votes shifted here or there would have qualified the Alameda County and Fremont races for automatic recounts — paid with public money — if their laws were the same as in Santa Clara County, where the required threshold is a margin of either 0.25% or 25 votes.

Instead, recounts in the East Bay are often prohibitively costly. An attempted recount of ranked-choice votes in the 2022 Oakland mayoral election was forfeited because no one could pay the expected $21,000 required for each day of counting.

“They are very much driven by the candidates paying for them,” Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis said in an interview. “Each day they have to bring a check to pay for that day’s recount.”

Recounts must be ordered within five days after an election is certified. The costs, which mostly pay election officials for doing the extra work, often vary based on if the requester orders a machine tabulation or manual hand-tally.

Close races are not unfamiliar to either region. In 2022, tied council races in both Sunnyvale and Richmond were decided, at different points, by officials drawing at random from bags.

There were two recounts for the Sunnyvale race, with one of the additional tallies covered by taxpayer dollars and the other costing the candidate who ordered it roughly $25,000.

California, meanwhile, has no laws for automatic recounts in statewide races.

Earlier this year, Assemblymember Evan Low, D-Cupertino, introduced a bill to create such a policy, but it did not advance past committee — and its very inception was widely seen as ironic, given that Low had previously tried to halt a recount in a Congressional race he ultimately lost to former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo.

Staff writer Stephanie Lam contributed reporting to this story.