Shoshana Walter/The Bay Citizen

Councilmember Jean Quan outside council chambers at Oakland's City Hall

An upset could be in the works in the Oakland mayor’s race.

Jean Quan took the lead Friday afternoon with 51 percent of the vote, after the preliminary results of ranked-choice voting were tabulated.

Former state Sen. Don Perata held a commanding lead — 35 percent to 24 percent — over Quan, a City Council member, on election night when just first-choice votes were counted.

The results are still not final though, because some votes haven’t been counted. In all of Alameda County, 122,000 provisional and mail-in ballots had yet to be counted as of Thursday, the registrar said. The East Bay Express estimated that at least 25,000 of those could be from Oakland.

That means the lead could change. Quan now leads Perata 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent, a margin of less than 2,000 votes. The come-from-behind rally showed that voters who put third-place finisher Rebecca Kaplan first were more likely to rank Quan than Perata as a second preference on their ballots.

The Quan campaign had been hoping that Perata, who was the target of a five-year FBI investigation, would be so polarizing that he wouldn’t capture any second-place votes.

“It looks like the anybody-but-Perata movement played a significant role,” Quan said Friday afternoon.

The way ranked-choice voting works is this: if no candidate gets a majority, then second- and third-place votes of the low vote getters in the race are counted until there is a winner.

With 41,949 votes, Perata picked up less than 10,000 votes from ballots where others were ranked first. Meanwhile, Quan, with her 43,825 votes, picked up more than 20,000.

On election night, the Perata campaign was confident that the former state senator would cruise to victory, and the San Francisco Chronicle predicted that Perata would win this week. The Oakland Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee, which endorsed Perata, sent out a press release Friday crowing, “Don Perata will be Oakland’s next Mayor!”

Perata outspent Quan and every other candidate after finding a loophole in the campaign finance code that lifted spending caps in the race.

Quan didn’t claim victory Friday because of all of the remaining absentee ballots that have yet to be counted, but she said: “I think it will be an amazing victory for grass-roots organizing over big money.”

Before Kaplan's votes were divvied up between Quan and Perata, she was trailing Quan by less than 3 percent of the vote.

For all the details of the instant runoff, go the Alameda County Registrar of Voters page here. 

UPDATE: Perata spokesman Rhys Williams emailed the following statement on the results: "It appears that there might be a reversal of fortune. We're unclear about Alameda County’s processes and await a final and accurate count. The mystery of Ranked Choice Voting continues."