Orange County could soon return to having a Republican majority on the county Board of Supervisors as updated election results Wednesday evening show Republicans holding leads on two of the three seats on the ballot – including one held by Democratic Supervisor Katrina Foley.
In early election results on Tuesday night, Foley held the lead, but eventually fell behind her challenger, Republican Assemblywoman Diane Dixon, in the Second District race
Updated ballot tallies from the OC Registrar of voters on Wednesday evening showed Assemblywoman Diane Dixon was leading with 48.5% of the vote, while Foley held over 45%.
If either candidate secures over 50% of the vote, they could win the seat immediately, skipping a runoff election in November.
It also comes after Foley claimed weeks ago that she’d already won the primary in a district where voter registration favors Republicans.
“I will look forward to when the election is over,” Foley said at the supervisors’ May 19 meeting. “The reality is, I’m for sure winning the primary, it’s a matter of whether we win outright or move onto the general.”
In the Fourth District, which covers most of Orange County, Democrat Buena Park Mayor Connor Traut and Republican OC Board of Education Trustee Tim Shaw were poised to head to a runoff election.
While Shaw held over 33% of the vote, Traut was at nearly 31%, with both remaining challengers at less than 19%.
Democrat Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento remained on track to win reelection in the second district, with 63% of the vote as of Wednesday evening.
It’s still unclear precisely how many votes are left to count according to OC Registrar Bob Page, who noted they were still waiting on mail in ballots from the post office and the final pickups from ballot drop boxes throughout the county in a Wednesday afternoon interview.
“We do our pickups in the morning and we had staff out there to make sure they were all blocked at 8 p.m. (on Election Day), but we sent our teams out today to pick up the ballots,” Page said.
He also noted that the county generally takes anywhere from four to nine days to wrap up counts ever since they implemented the Voter’s Choice Act in 2020 – before that, the counts could regularly take a couple weeks according to Page.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
