In an election for mayor of Oakland CA today,  former State Senator Don Perata leads a crowded field, according to an exclusive KPIX-TV poll conducted by SurveyUSA.

Voters have the opportunity to indicate their 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices for Mayor. Perata gets 41% of 1st-choice votes, City Council Member Jean Quan gets 26%, City Council Member Rebecca Kaplan gets 14%. 10 others on the ballot combine for 12%. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated, and that candidate’s votes are re-allocated based on the second choice. This continues until a candidate has a majority of votes.

When asked for a 2nd choice:
Those whose 1st choice is Kaplan break 4:3 for Perata.
Those whose 1st choice is Quan break 3:2 for Kaplan.

It is impossible in a telephone survey to mirror exactly how voters will behave when given the opportunity to mark their ballots 3 times, but the cascading series of questions that SurveyUSA asked, and the crosstabs that accompany them, offer a window into just where support for runners-up would go.