Interesting IRV result for Oakland Mayor race

[rob in cal]

In my past life when I lived in the Bay Area I worked a little with some of the people who helped get IRV, or the truncated version being used, anyway, in these Bay Area cities.  I'm glad they've succeeded as far as they've had, but I still wait for the day when there will be a partisan race for a federal office using it, when people can then truly vote for a third party, if they so desire, without worrying about "wasting their vote" . 
     I fear that the Oakland results will alienate people from the system and lead to opposition to it.  The fact that the first place finisher ends up losing may lead to this happening.  Of course, thats the whole point of IRV, to make sure that the final winner had support of the majority (in theory at least, I realize there are some shortcomings to it).  We see this case in Australia now, where several Labour candidates will narrowly trail Lib/Nat candidates in the first count, but overtake them when the second choice of the trailing Green candidate voters get put in the mix.

[rob in cal]

Perata said something to the effect that if this had been a normal election he would have won by a landslide.  Normal big city elections in California for mayor include runoffs, (not sure if Oakland used to have runoff for mayor, but LA and San Francisco do, or SF did anyway before RCV), so actually if this had been a normal election we'd have had a runoff anyway, and it would obviously have been a close final result.