Election update: 4 candidates vie for 2 spots in close LA city attorney’s race

Former federal prosecutor Marina Torres leads financial law attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto by 3,606 votes Saturday in the race for the second spot on the November ballot for Los Angeles city attorney with 4,715 votes separating the top four candidates.

Torres has 69,353 votes (20.41%) to 65,747 (19.35%) for Soto, according to updated results released Friday by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.

Civil rights attorney Faisal Gill leads the seven-candidate field with 69,469 votes (20.45%). Deputy City Attorney Richard Kim is fourth with 64,754 votes (19.06%).

Because no candidate received a majority, the top two finishers will meet in a runoff in November.

Friday’s update saw labor organizer Hugo Soto-Martinez move into first place in the race to represent City Council District 13 — which includes Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park and Atwater Village — overtaking the incumbent, Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, by 41 votes. Both candidates were already leading the rest of the field and are expected to compete in a November runoff.

The update released Friday incorporated 169,338 ballots — 168,566 vote-by-mail ballots and 772 in-person votes, from Los Angeles County voters, according to Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan’s office. On Wednesday, the day after the election, Logan estimated that 400,000 vote-by-mail ballots still needed to be tallied, along with 680 conditional voter-registration ballots, 105 provisional ballots and 300 other miscellaneous ballots.

The registrar’s office will continue to accept ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received by Tuesday.

The updated results added to former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry’s lead over Culver City Mayor Daniel W. Lee in their battle to take on Sen. Sydney Kamlager in the Nov. 8 general election for the 37th Congressional District seat which was vacated by Rep. Karen Bass to run for mayor.

Going into Friday, Perry had a 1,085-vote lead over Lee, but that margin expanded to 1,250 when updated results were released. All three candidates are Democrats.

Nonprofit director/businesswoman Tina Simone McKinnor added 121 votes to her lead over Lawndale Mayor Robert Pullen-Miles in the 62nd Assembly District special election to pull 1,154 votes ahead of her fellow Democrat.

The next update will be released Tuesday, Logan said.

The closest statewide race is for state superintendent of public instruction, where software architect George Yang increased his lead in the race for second place to 2,124 votes over Lance Ray Christensen, the vice president, education policy & government affairs of California Policy Center, which bills itself as an educational nonprofit organization working for the prosperity of all Californians by eliminating public-sector barriers to freedom.

Yang held a 422-vote lead over teacher Ainye E. Long when Friday’s vote count started. Long dropped to fourth Friday, 3,507 votes behind Yang. The second-place finisher in the nonpartisan race will face incumbent Tony K. Thurmond in November.

Republican Robert Howell, a cybersecurity equipment manufacturer, saw his lead over Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine in the race for second for insurance commissioner decrease to 10,947 votes — down from 38,931 — in the race to face incumbent Democrat Ricardo Lara.

In the attorney general’s race, former Assistant U.S. Attorney General Nathan Hochman extended his lead over fellow Republican Eric Early, an attorney and business owner, to 70,295 votes after leading by 66,479 at the start of Friday’s vote count. The second-place finisher will face appointed Democratic incumbent Rob Bonta in November.

There were an estimated 2.766 million unprocessed ballots statewide following the election and 2.625 million Friday, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.