The most unpredictable race in the East Bay just got more wild. Updated results in Fremont’s District 4 City Council election show Niles community leader Robert Daulton leads Fremont school board member Yang Shao by just four votes.
Monday evening’s update from the Alameda County Registrar of Voters is also the third time the lead in the council race has changed since the Nov. 6 elections. Shao led the field before relinquishing it to Daulton.
Over the holiday weekend, Shao grabbed the lead in what appeared to be a batch of ballots primarily from precincts favorable to Shao. By Monday, Daulton had again closed the gap.
Fremont’s new District 4, formed last year when the city opted to switch away from at-large election, sits at the eastern portion of the city and is split by Mission Boulevard.
The novelty of Fremont’s council expansion from five to seven members may also be a symptom of these highly unusual results. Aside from the swings at the top of the results, from top to bottom, the spread among the five-person field is just 8 percentage points.
It’s indicator that the nascent district does not yet have an identifiable power center, with many of the candidates in this race individually drawing from different demographics or that the large Asian American community in the district is being split among the three Asian American candidates.
It is unclear how many uncounted ballots remain in Fremont’s District 4, although 128,000 have yet to be tabulated, following Monday’s update.
>Fremont City Council D4
ROBERT DAULTON (1,796 votes) 24.59%
YANG SHAO (1,792) 24.54%
CRAIG STECKLER 18.12%
DEBBIE WANTANUKI 16.42%
JUSTIN SHA 16.14%
ebcitizen.com 