Berkeley mayor's race down to a few hundred votes

The Berkeley mayor’s race continues to tighten as more votes are counted, with just a few hundred votes separating Sophie Hahn and Adena Ishii as of Monday afternoon.

The ranked-choice contest now has Hahn with 17,437 votes and Ishii with 17,055, a 51% to 49% margin.

The Alameda County registrar of voters has tallied about 37,000 Berkeley ballots and is expecting around 55,000 in the end, according to current estimates.

None of the Berkeley mayoral candidates secured more than 50% of the vote, which triggered a ranked-choice contest.

The 18,000 or so Berkeley ballots tallied by the end of Election Day saw Hahn with nearly 53% of the vote and Ishii with 47%.

But, as more votes have been counted, the margin has narrowed.

Hahn, who has been active in Berkeley politics for more than a decade, was the frontrunner in the race.

She elected to seek the open mayor’s seat vacated by Jesse Arreguín rather than run again for the District 5 City Council seat she had occupied since 2016.

Ishii, who has not previously held public office, has presented herself as a coalition-builder who will bring “people together around common sense solutions” and offer an alternative to the “drama” at City Hall.

In the lead-up to the election, Ishii picked up high-profile endorsements from Senator Nancy Skinner and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks as well as The Mercury News and East Bay Times.

“This is an exciting development, and we are anxiously awaiting Friday’s update,” Ishii said Monday shortly after publication.

Hahn did not respond to a request for comment and had not reacted on social media about Monday’s election results as of publication time.

The next Alameda County election results are not expected until Friday, Nov. 15.

The ROV has tallied about 483,000 ballots countywide as of Monday with an estimated total of about 700,000 ballots expected in the end.