Quemars Ahmed increased his lead by one whole vote in a close race for a second seat on the La Cañada Flintridge City Council, according to the latest vote count released Wednesday afternoon.
Ahmed, a member of the city’s Sustainability and Resilience Commission, was leading Planning Commissioner Nerses Aposhian by 222 votes at 29.7% to Aposhian’s 27.8%, according to the L.A. County Registrar of Voters.
Ahmed’s lead was an ever so small increase from Tuesday’s tally of 221, and a spike from Monday, on which he had a 207-vote lead.
The two candidates are among a trio of candidates vying for two seats on the council. Mayor Kim Bowman had garnered 42.5% in updated results Monday afternoon, a position he’s held since last Tuesday, when initial returns were posted.
The top two vote-getters will win the seats.
• Also see: June 2 Primary Election Results
The city, like many, is dealing with how to make housing more affordable, along with land use and planning. But public safety and emergency preparedness, in a small city that neighbors the disaster footprint of the Eaton fire, have become common themes in the race.
The majority of ballots still being counted are primarily those sent by mail or submitted in drop boxes close to or on Election Day. Those ballots are generally believed to skew toward Democrats, since Democratic voters are more likely to mail their ballots.
Ballots can be received as long as a week after the election, as long as they were postmarked by June 2. Under Assembly Bill 5, which took effect this year, counties are required to count and report most ballots by June 15.
Certain ballot types are exempt from that deadline, including provisional ballots, conditional voter registration ballots, signature cure ballots, ballots requiring duplication, ballots forwarded from other counties and some late-arriving vote-by-mail ballots, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The estimated number of outstanding ballots to be processed countywide by the Registrar’s Office was 23,000, according to a Monday update from the office. Of those, 18,000 were vote-by-mail ballots postmarked Election Day.
City News Service contributed to this report.