Matt Mahan maintained a slender lead over Cindy Chavez within the race to turn into San Jose’s subsequent mayor with the most recent up to date poll depend Friday night.
The District 10 Metropolis Councilman is 4,768 votes forward of Santa Clara County Supervisor Chavez, barely lower than the 5,452-vote hole that separated the candidates on Thursday. Mahan has 51.38% to Chavez’ 48.62% of the 172,698 votes counted Friday, barely larger than her 48.24% Thursday.
For Chavez, Friday’s outcomes provided a welcome ray of hope as she has trailed in each earlier replace within the tight race however this time noticed her opponent’s lead slender.
“The registrar of voters is making super progress and continues to depend tens of 1000's of votes which might be nonetheless excellent,” Chavez mentioned Friday. “We need to be sure voters are heard on this necessary election.”
Mahan echoed that sentiment Friday.
“There are nonetheless a number of votes to be counted and undoubtedly the margin will proceed to bounce round, so all of us simply need to be affected person and let the democratic course of play out,” Mahan mentioned.
About 62% of estimated complete ballots have been counted all through Santa Clara County, roughly half of which might be from San Jose, the county’s largest metropolis and the tenth largest within the U.S. Elections officers have been working by means of a pile of 223,000 unprocessed ballots countywide Friday.
The winner will substitute termed-out Mayor Sam Liccardo, who has endorsed Mahan, together with enterprise and actual property teams, whereas Mahan’s fellow council members gave their nod to Chavez, who loved labor and enterprise assist in her second bid for the seat.
The mayor race turned on questions of who would greatest deal with rising violent crime and homelessness.
Chavez, a labor chief who additionally served as a San Jose councilwoman and vice mayor, ran on her expertise in elected workplace.
She mentioned San Jose’s police power stays 200 officers in need of the division’s staffing when she left Metropolis Corridor after 2006. She pointed to her efforts to get a $950 million bond for reasonably priced housing handed, which helped home 20,000 individuals over the past 5 years.
Mahan, a former social media entrepreneur and schoolteacher who joined the council in 2020, countered that homeless encampments have proliferated whereas Chavez’ centered on costly and time-consuming long-term reasonably priced housing initiatives.
He argued efforts to develop the town’s police power have been restricted by the price of beneficiant profit packages that Chavez and different council members authorised years in the past, and that her bail reforms have put too many criminals again out on the streets.
Ballots should be postmarked by Nov. 8 however will probably be counted so long as they arrive by Nov. 15. Santa Clara County election employees will probably be working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. by means of the weekend and into subsequent week processing ballots, and updates will probably be posted publicly on Saturday and Sunday. The employees should verify that the poll envelope signature matches what’s on file for the voter, look at and flatten the poll so it gained’t jam the counting machines, and run them by means of.
Whereas the ballots are sorted by precinct, these run by means of the counting machines every day are grabbed from processing racks for quite a lot of precincts, so every day’s depend isn’t weighted towards one geographic space or one other, Santa Clara County elections division spokesman Michael Borja mentioned.