The Oakland City Council voted this week to settle a lawsuit over alleged improprieties in the lead-up to the 2022 mayoral election, but did so without admitting to any wrongdoing.
The suit, filed in 2023 by the Alameda County Taxpayers Association and attorney Marleen Sacks, alleges that the Oakland city clerk allowed now-former mayor Sheng Thao and two other candidates to file their nomination paperwork late.
While the candidates had been told that the deadline to file was Aug. 17, the clerk’s office alerted them on Aug. 12 that the deadline was actually at 5 p.m. that day, according to the suit.
After the candidates scrambled to make it to the clerk’s office, the suit alleges that somebody in the office timestamped their paperwork to make it look like it was filed before the deadline.
The timestamp machines were also broken and staff allegedly forgot to manually adjust them to accurately reflect the correct time as the deadline passed, according to the lawsuit.
“An overall lack of election integrity, lack of public accountability, and staggering incompetence and government dysfunction were at the heart of this lawsuit,” Sacks said in a news release. “ACTA and I are satisfied that the main issues have been or are going to be addressed soon.”
Sacks also claims that her efforts to document when candidates were entering the clerk’s office on Aug. 12 were stymied by the fact that the city allegedly failed to retain security camera footage for at least a year.
“An overall lack of election integrity, lack of public accountability, and staggering incompetence and government dysfunction were at the heart of this lawsuit.”
Attorney Marleen Sacks
According to the terms of the settlement, the city agrees to pay Sacks $207,812 in attorney fees and court costs, keep working timestamp machines in the clerk’s office, ensure candidates get accurate information about timelines for filing paperwork, forward election integrity complaints to city administrators and the city attorney, not accept late nomination paperwork, and keep video camera footage at City Hall for at least one year, among other things.
The city doesn’t admit to any liability or wrongdoing in the settlement agreement, which is silent on the question of whether any candidate, including Thao, should or should not have been listed on the ballot because of the deadline issue.
Oakland City Attorney Ryan Richardson declined to comment on the agreement.
The lawsuit also alleged that the city violated the California Public Records Act but Sacks said that the city had already agreed to certain policy changes as a result of an earlier lawsuit involving former mayor Libby Schaaf’s alleged use of her personal email account for city business.
Sacks said the city agreed to ensure that officials and employees use city email accounts to conduct city business and that “city employees/officials shall not use personal email addresses, text messaging services or apps, personal devices to willfully avoid compliance with the Public Records Act.”
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