SACRAMENTO, Calif. — People watching Sacramento’s mayoral race will have to continue holding their breath for a few more days... or weeks.
The latest results – released just before midnight on election night – show a statistical near-dead heat between the three leading candidates, with the fourth-place candidate relatively close behind.
The next wave of results aren’t due until 4 p.m. Friday, a spokesperson with the Sacramento County Elections Office said. The county must certify the final count by April 4. They plan on releasing updated results by 4 p.m. every Tuesday and Friday until the vote is certified.
For now, former state senator Dr. Richard Pan is in the lead with 7,840 votes. Trailing by just four votes in second place is former Sacramento city councilmember Steve Hansen with 7,836 votes. 159 votes behind Hansen is Assemblymember Kevin McCarty with 7,677 votes. And 645 votes behind him, in fourth place, is epidemiologist Dr. Flo Cofer with 7,032 votes.
The two other candidates in the race – Jose Antonio Aviña II and Julius Engel – are in distant fifth and sixth places, respectively, with 7.26% and 1.01% of the votes tallied so far.
It’s important to note these early results account for just 12.69% of all the possible ballots that could come in for the Sacramento mayoral race. That is to say there are 274,198 registered voters within Sacramento city limits and the results from 34,799 ballots, or 12.69%, have been released.
Given this is a presidential primary with the two candidates all but officially nominated – Donald Trump and Joe Biden – experts say voters have been less motivated to cast a ballot and are therefore predicting lower voter turnout of around 33%. If that prediction winds up being the case, then fewer than half of the ballots in the Sacramento mayoral race have been tabulated and released to the public at this point.
In other words, 808 votes currently separate first from fourth place, and we’re still waiting on the results of north of 50,000 votes. The top two vote-getters will go on to compete in the November election.
"So many people stay home and figure, 'My vote doesn't count.' This shows, dramatically, that your vote does, in fact, count,” political analyst Steve Swatt told ABC10.
At watch parties Tuesday night in Sacramento's mayoral race, the four frontrunners expressed optimism, even Cofer, who - when the very first results rolled out at 8 p.m. was then more than 1,000 votes behind the third place candidate. She narrowed that to 645 votes by midnight.
“We know that most of the people — I mean, even my campaign staff — everybody was turning their ballots in today,” Cofer said that night. “We're really feeling good about what the next few batches are going to show."
"It's entirely possible between now and early April that top four could flip a little bit,” said Swatt. “I mean, it's that close."
The tight race means voters had good choices, he said.
"I think the closeness of the vote tells you that you had some really good quality candidates and with a lot of experience in politics and other fields, and I think that draws people to the polls,” Swatt said. “This is a fascinating race, it really is."
ABC10 spoke with the three leading candidates the day after the election. Cofer’s team declined an interview, saying they’re looking forward to Friday’s batch of results. Hansen, McCarty and Pan say they're well aware things could change.
"We're likely going to see a nail-biter right here in Sacramento in the mayor's race,” McCarty said. “Put on your seatbelt, Sacramento. It's going to be a couple weeks."
"People have mailed in their ballots. Some of those are still in the post office; they haven't made their way over, and those votes deserve to get counted, too,” said Pan.
"I think it's very sacred to let the votes be counted,” Hansen said. “Turnout, I think, will be higher than some people expected. We saw so many people voting last-minute."
Ultimately, Swatt said, the vote of the mayor holds no more weight than that of a city councilmember, since Sacramento's form of government is council-manager, not strong mayor.
"City manager makes a lot of the critical decisions, including budgeting,” Swatt said. “The mayor basically is one member of the city council that has a bully pulpit."
Speaking with ABC10 on election night, current Mayor Darrell Steinberg - who is not seeking a third term - emphasized that point, too.
"There is a big gap between how the people see the mayor as accountable and able to do everything, and the authority that the mayor actually has,” Steinberg said. “I think, to level-set with the voters about how things get done and how it takes more than the mayor. It takes the entire city. It takes the city team. It takes the county of Sacramento, since they're integral when it comes to homelessness because they are the health and human services providers, the mental health providers, the substance abuse providers for the city and county of Sacramento.”
The top two vote-getters, who will advance to the general election in November, will emerge more clearly in coming weeks.
Why are the results so slow to come out? Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law in Sept. 2021, making universal vote-by-mail permanent – where every registered California voter receives a ballot by mail. It first started in 2020 as a response to the pandemic. On one hand, the measure makes voting more accessible. On the other hand, it can slow down the process of learning results.
People who dropped a ballot into a USPS mailbox over the weekend or Monday or Tuesday likely didn’t have their ballot arrive at their county’s elections office in time to be counted among the initial results released that night. In Sacramento County, elections workers are continuing to collect and count the ballots still arriving by mail. As long as a ballot was postmarked by Election Day it is allowed to be counted.
WATCH MORE ON ABC10: Sacramento's mayoral race is still a nail biter
