EAST PALO ALTO — East Palo Alto residents are still waiting to find out which of the nine candidates will fill the three empty spots on the city council.
Incumbent Carlos Romero leads the race, with 16.8% of the vote. Webster Lincoln trails next with 16.36% of the vote and Mark Dinan is in third place with 15.75%. Results were last updated on 2 a.m. Wednesday, according to San Mateo County.
Deborah Lewis-Virges trails close behind the top three candidates by about 200 votes, with 13.32%.
City council candidates lined the parking lot of a recreation center in East Palo Alto Tuesday, a last-minute effort to garner votes by flagging down voters heading in to cast their ballots at the Lewis and Joan Platt Family YMCA.
“A lot of people are coming — they’ve just been painting houses or they’ve been working construction or whatever — and bringing their kids. It’s a beautiful scene. I mean, it’s democracy in action,” Dinan said.
Reba Phillips, 35, a lifelong East Palo Alto resident, said that although casting her vote in the presidential election is important, the local city council race has a deep and direct impact on the city’s residents.
“In East Palo Alto, you win by small margins. The difference can be between seven to 10 votes,” Phillips said.
Phillips said she voted for Webster Lincoln, who she went to school with, in the city council race.
“These people, they’re my neighbors who are working for the city council,” Phillips said. “Their kids go to schools in these neighborhoods. So everything that they bring to us and put forward not only benefits the people of the community, but it also benefits themselves.”
Lincoln, 37, who grew up in the city, started tabling outside of the recreation center at 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday and said he’d never “seen lines this long in East Palo Alto.”
There were only two in-person voting locations in the city on Election Day. In the early evening, the line at the recreation center hovered at about 50 to 60 people at a time.
Isabel Vargas, 32, rushed to the voting center Tuesday afternoon with her three young children to cast her ballot.
“The measures and the people who are in council can affect my kids’ future. I also want to make sure that they know that it’s important to vote,” Vargas said.
Vargas brought her unfilled mail-in ballot to the recreation center so she could talk to the candidates canvassing outside. She said she waited until the last day to vote so she could get face-to-face interactions with the candidates who were vying for her vote.
“What matters is the people, the children in our community — whether we’re safe from violence,” Vargas said. “I just want to see a safer East Palo Alto.”
Ana Maria Sandoval, 76, has lived in East Palo Alto for over 20 years and voted in person on Tuesday. She said car accidents are very common in the area and hopes the city can address this issue by adding more traffic signals.
“There’s a lot of things that need fixing here — the water, the drainage, the security in our streets,” Sandoval said.
Maria Nava, 59, spent an hour and a half in line to cast her ballot Tuesday afternoon. Despite the long line, Nava, who has lived in the city for 17 years, said “It was worth the wait.”
Dinan, who is third in the race as of Wednesday, voted in person Tuesday morning and canvassed outside the polling station late into the evening.
“There were a lot of voters coming through, so I didn’t want to leave it on the table,” Dinan said. “I just canceled everything for the rest of the day, came by here, and put up a table.”
Dinan said he spoke to hundreds of voters and handed out flyers, as did other candidates in the nine-person race. He said most voters he spoke with “have not paid an ounce of attention to local races.”
“Local elections will have more impact on their life than the national elections, most likely. You know, it’s about whether we have a parks and rec department, it’s about whether we have your street paved. All the things that local government takes care of, it directly impacts the lives of everybody here.”
