While out candidates in special elections for seats on the Oakland and San Jose city councils await final vote counts in their respective races, they find themselves in polar opposite positions. The South Bay contest is headed toward a recount, whereas the East Bay race appears to have been won outright on the first vote count.
In both contests a candidate needed to surpass 50% of the vote in order to clinch the council seat. For the Oakland race, the outcome is decided by ranked choice voting if no candidate reaches that threshold on the first round of tabulations.
After polls closed in Tuesday’s special election for the District 2 seat on the Oakland City Council, lesbian civil rights and environmental justice expert Charlene Wang found herself in first place with 50.45% on the initial vote count. And after five rounds of instant runoff voting, she had a commanding 66.49% of the vote, according to the unofficial returns as of Wednesday morning.
In second place with 33.51% of the vote is Kara Murray-Badal, the director of Terner Lab's Housing Venture Lab who had been endorsed by the former elected holder of the council seat that includes Oakland’s LGBTQ cultural district near Lake Merritt. The next vote count in the race will come on Friday, when a new tally will also be posted in the special election to decide Oakland’s next mayor. (See related story.)
As of Wednesday morning, Wang had yet to declare victory. In an Election Day post on Instagram, Wang noted, “District 2 is home to Oakland's Chinatown, Little Saigon, and LGBTQ+ cultural district. I'll fight for safety and opportunity for all of Oakland's communities!”
For the last week, only a handful of votes has determined if gay San Jose Planning Commission chair Anthony Tordillos was in second or third place in his race for his city’s District 3 council seat. After the April 15 vote update, he saw his second-place showing edge up by five votes to 2,005 for 22.19% of the total counted.
Matthew Quevedo, deputy chief of staff to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who had sole endorsed him, stands in third place with 22.13% of the vote for a total count of 2,000. Whoever takes second place will face off against first-place finisher in the April 8 special election Gabriela "Gabby" Chavez-Lopez.
A single mom who is executive director of South Bay nonprofit the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley, Chavez-Lopez is in the top spot with 29.98% of the 9,100 ballots cast. Her total stands at 2,709 votes and is assured of moving on to the June 24 runoff election.
Meanwhile, in Southern California, bisexual Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre is headed to the July 1 runoff for the open District 1 seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. The Democrat placed second in her April 8 contest with nearly 32% of the vote, according to the unofficial returns, and will face off against Republican Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, who placed first with 42% of the vote.
Bay Area council contests
Wang was one of six candidates vying in the special April 15 election to serve out the remainder of the term through 2026 vacated by Nikki Fortunato Bas after her election last November to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Wang is set to be one of three out women on the council and one of the few out female Asian elected leaders in the Bay Area.
Lesbian interim District 2 councilmember Rebecca Kaplan will be stepping down as soon as Wang is sworn into office. She opted last year not to seek reelection to the council’s at-large seat that she had held for close to two decades and then was tapped by the council as a caretaker of Bas’ seat.
In the South Bay, Tordillos is aiming to return out leadership to the San Jose City Council and be only the third LGBTQ community member to serve on it. The District 3 seat covering much of the city’s downtown and its Qmunity LGBTQ district has been represented since earlier this year by engineering firm owner Carl Salas.
He was selected as a caretaker of the seat by the council following the resignation last fall of gay former councilmember Omar Torres due to his arrest for allegedly molesting a cousin years prior. As the final day of voting was underway to decide who will serve out the remainder of his term through 2026, Torres that Tuesday was in a Santa Clara County courtroom pleading no contest to child sex crimes and is now awaiting his sentencing.
Elected in 2022, Torres was the first gay Latino and out person of color to serve on the San Jose City Council, and only its second out councilmember. The governing body had gone 16 years without a member from the LGBTQ community until Torres took his oath of office two years ago.
According to the county registrar, it will count any ballots postmarked as of April 8 and received as of Tuesday. Chavez-Lopez gained one vote Wednesday, with 19 challenged ballots remaining as of that morning and the next update coming Friday by 5 p.m.
Under the county’s election codes, if the vote difference between Tordillos and Quevedo is less than .25% then there will be an automatic hand recount. Tordillos leads by .06% at the moment.
Since no candidate captured more than half of the votes, the election will be decided by the summer runoff, which will coincide with this year’s Pride week celebrations in cities around the Bay Area and across the country.
Should she win the seat, Chavez-Lopez, 37, would be the second Latina to represent District 3 and the first to do so since 2006. The Santa Clara County Democratic Party had dual endorsed Chavez-Lopez and Tordillos, 33, an engineering manager at YouTube married to cancer biologist Giovanni Forcina.
Quevedo, 36, had thrown his support behind a recall attempt of Torres prior to his resignation last year. From a Mexican-American family, Quevedo is a San Jose native who has two sons with his wife, A’Dreana.
San Diego candidate has Bay Area ties
Born in San Francisco, Aguirre moved at age 8 back to her parent’s hometown of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and relocated to Southern California in 2001 to pursue her higher education and compete as a top bodyboarder. In 2022, she won election as mayor of her city, where she resides with her husband, Delio, and their dog, Dasha.
Aguirre jumped into the supervisorial race following the surprise decision in late December by former San Diego County supervisor Nora Vargas that she was resigning despite being elected to a second term last November.
The election for her seat has been followed closely throughout the state as it will determine if Democrats or Republicans will have a three-person majority on the county board. It is currently evenly split between the four supervisors on it, including nonbinary and pansexual District 3 San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, a Democrat who won reelection last year.
The top three Democrats running in the special election combined received nearly 53% of the vote Tuesday. It bodes well for Aguirre if she can consolidate support from her party’s voters in the summer runoff.
She suggested as much in an election night statement, arguing that voters in the district had sent "a clear message” and “want a supervisor who fights on the side of working people who are struggling, gets results on the sewage crisis, and pushes for the more affordable San Diego County we need."
The seat represents the cities of Chula Vista, Imperial Beach and National City, along with a large swath of San Diego and several unincorporated communities. Like Tordillos and Wang, Aguirre had received support from state and national LGBTQ groups for her candidacy.
In a statement congratulating Aguirre for her making it to the runoff election, gay Equality California Executive Director Tony Hoang noted that her opponent is “a far-right extremist aligned particularly with Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, is out of step with the values of District 1 voters. The people of San Diego County deserve a leader who will fight for all communities – not just a select few. Equality California is proud to support Paloma and will continue working to ensure her victory in June.”
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