Kim Nguyen, a 25-year-old Democrat, will be the first person of Latino descent elected to Garden Grove City Council, according to the last Election Day vote tally by the Orange County Registrar of Voters.
Nguyen, with 57.3 percent of the vote, beat fellow Democrat Rickk Montoya. A police dispatcher and the plaintiff in the California Voting Rights Act lawsuit that forced a shift to by-district elections, Montoya received 42.7 percent of the vote.
The Vietnamese-Latina will represent District 6, the easternmost part of Garden Grove where the greatest concentration of Latino residents reside.
The latest vote tally as of 1:30 a.m. Wednesday does not include any vote-by-mail ballots that are received after Election Day or uncounted provisional ballots, meaning the final vote tally could still.
Meanwhile, in District 3, Democrat Thu-Ha Nguyen scored a decisive win over Republican Clay Bock. Nguyen, a research scientist, garnered 64.3 percent of the vote; while Bock finished with 35.7 percent.
Republican Stephanie Klopfenstein took the District 5 seat with 56.9 percent of the vote. Her only competitor, Democrat Demian-Garcia Monroy, a home health care nurse, finished with 43.1 percent of the vote.
Planning Commissioner John O’Neill, who was unopposed, was elected to the District 2 seat with 5,190 votes.
Councilman Steve Jones, who garnered 28,556 votes, will be the next mayor of Garden Grove. The Registrar’s online voting portal did not include any votes for write-in mayoral candidate Tony Flores,
The Registrar will update the vote count each day at 5 p.m. until all votes are counted. Click here for updates from the Registrar of Voters.
Contact Thy Vo at tvo@voiceofoc.org or follow her on Twitter @thyanhvo.