In the races for three Los Angeles County supervisors, incumbents Holly Mitchell, Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger continued to hold commanding leads, as the first post-election day update was released Wednesday, March 6.
Incumbent supervisors Mitchell and Barger continued to carry large leads over their challengers, which could secure them outright wins. Hahn’s race against former sheriff Alex Villanueva was slightly tighter, though Hahn led by nearly 26 percentage points.
See the latest election results
The L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk added 105,717 more ballots to Wednesday’s update. These represent vote-by-mail ballots and ballots from vote centers. In total, 1,016,574 ballots were processed and counted thus far.
While these latest election returns show that incumbents led in the contests for District 2, District 4 and District 5 — three seats on the powerful, five-person county board — winners won’t be known for several days or even weeks as votes continue to be counted through March 29.
In these races, the candidate with 50% of the votes plus one wins the seat outright. Otherwise, the top two vote-getters in Tuesday’s primary election will face each other in a November runoff. County races are non-partisan.
Here is where the races stood as of Wednesday evening:
In District 2, Supervisor Holly Mitchell led the race with 66.2% of the vote. If that holds Mitchell would be declared the winner.
Daphne Bradford remained in a distant second place with 13.5% of the vote. In third place was Clint Carlton with 12.4%, while Katrina Williams was in fourth place with 7.9%. They are competing to represent a swath of the South Bay’s coastal communities — Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo and Redondo Beach as well as Hawthorne, Lawndale, Gardena, Culver City, Inglewood, Compton, Carson and L.A. communities of Watts, Exposition Park and Koreatown.
In District 4, Supervisor Janice Hahn has seen a slight drop in her lead since the early vote-by-mail ballots were counted, but on Wednesday evening she upped her lead slightly to 55.6%.
“These early returns are encouraging but nonetheless there are still many votes to be counted. We look forward to watching as the votes continue to be counted,” said Dave Jacobson, Hahn’s campaign consultant in an email on Wednesday.
Villanueva, the former Los Angeles County sheriff who lost his position to current Sheriff Robert Luna in November 2022, was at 29.9% of the vote and said he liked his odds of getting into a runoff with Hahn in November.
“Every update we are gaining ground. I like the odds; they are pretty good,” he said on Wednesday.
In a distant third place with 14.6% was Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor John Cruikshank.
The candidates are running in a redrawn district that spans 411 square miles and runs from Torrance, Palos Verdes, San Pedro and Long Beach up through the 605 Freeway corridor cities to Whittier, then westerly to Huntington Park, Lynwood and South Gate.
In District 5, Supervisor Kathryn Barger and Chris Holden, a Democratic Assembly member from Pasadena, spent more than $1 million each and voters received multiple mailers attacking each candidate. Barger was well ahead with 59.8% of the vote while Holden was in second place at 20.7%, slipping behind his previous percentage. Holden declined to comment on Wednesday.
The district runs from the north county area of the Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita Valley, through the Angeles National Forest and the foothill communities of the San Gabriel Valley.
Konstantine Anthony, a member of the Burbank City Council, remained in third place. He picked up some ground on Wednesday with 9.3% of the vote, followed by Perry Goldberg of Acton with 7.9% of the vote and Marlon Marroquin with 2.4%.
Anthony said he figured Holden would have done better. Barger, a Republican, emphasized her progressive stands on key issues. Winning the endorsement from Planned Parenthood cemented what appeared to be a winning margin, Anthony said.
“For a female voter, abortion rights was top one or top two in issues,” Anthony said. He added: “Trying to unseat an incumbent L.A. County supervisor is next to impossible.”
The L.A. County supervisors are some of the most powerful local government officials in the country.
The five board members oversee a county of about 10 million residents, a number that exceeds the population of most U.S. states. The Board of Supervisors can pass local laws with a three-fifths vote. Unlike the city level, where the elected mayor can veto a law passed by the city council, the county CEO cannot veto a Board of Supervisors decision.
With its $46.7 billion budget, the board oversees the county sheriff’s and fire departments, jails, juvenile detention, probation, public health and hospitals, parks, recreation, libraries and homeless programs.
The board also oversees unincorporated communities such as East Los Angeles, Hacienda Heights, Agoura and Altadena. And its members serve on the LA Metro Board of Directors, which runs the county’s trains, buses, bike share and micro-transit systems and plans future bus and rail lines.