Updated results in San Mateo County’s City Council races show largely unchanged winners from preliminary vote counts released on election night, with the fight for the third seat on the Foster City Council showing Phoebe Venkat extending a slight election night lead over Shankar Kenkre by a hair.
The Foster City Council has three open seats, and results as of midnight Nov. 6 showed Suzy Niederhofer and Patrick Sullivan likely to take two of those. Venkat was trailing earlier but pulled to the third position at the last report of the night, by only 17.16%, or 3,221 votes, with Kenkre at 17.08%, or 3,206 votes.
Now, as of semiofficial results released Nov. 7 — with 50.1% voter turnout and 221,877 ballots counted — have Venkat at 17.7% of the vote and Kenkre at 17.08%, a race still too close to call. She’s now pulled 17 votes ahead of Kenkre, with 3,328 votes counted.
Niederhofer and Sullivan remain in comfortable positions to take seats on the council, with approximately 105,000 ballots left to count in the county.
In Redwood City, two races were also on thin margins on election night — in District 3, Isabella Chu was ahead of incumbent Lissette Espinoza Garcia by 52.05% of the vote, only 68 votes ahead as of midnight Nov. 5. Chu has held onto that lead as of Nov. 7, with 52.9% of the vote — now 75 votes ahead of Espinoza Garcia.
In District 7, Marcella Padilla was pulling ahead of Diana Reddy by a slim 51.5% compared to Reddy’s 48.5% on election night. Those numbers did not move much on Nov. 7, with Padilla now holding 2,030 votes — 51.75% — compared to Reddy’s 1,893 votes.
Reddy said she wasn’t stressed about the election results and knew it would take time to come to a final result.
“I was elected to the City Council in 2018 and we went through this. It took two weeks for all ballots to be counted,” she said. “It’s not healthy to obsess over the daily [results], so I’m taking it one day at a time, and understand that it takes a long time for the Elections Office to get through all those thousands of ballots.”
In Half Moon Bay, it continues to seem likely that challengers in the District 2 and 3 seats will unseat incumbents Harvey Rarback and Joaquin Jimenez.
As of midnight Nov. 5, Patric Bo Jonsson held 56.9% of the vote compared to Rarback’s 43.1%, with Rarback trailing by 89 votes. The Nov. 7 results show only a few percentage points of movement — Jonsson now has 55.4% of the vote, and Rarback has 44.5%. He’s now behind by 77 votes.
In the District 3 seat, Paul Nagengast held a commanding 61% lead over Jimenez on election night, which also hasn’t changed by much on Nov. 7. Jimenez now has 358 votes, of 39.2% of the vote, and Nagengast holds 556 votes, or 60.9%.
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