Los Angeles mayor race: Karen Bass increases lead over Rick Caruso as counting continues
Tori Richards
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Rep. Karen Bass has expanded her lead by 36,349 votes over billionaire Rick Caruso in the race to be Los Angeles’s next mayor.
The latest election results show Bass with 52.55% over Caruso’s 47.45%. Bass has 375,143 votes compared to Caruso’s 338,794, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder has reported on its website.
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Voter turnout in the Nov. 8 midterm election was 33.63% of the county’s 3.7 million registered voters. The county still has an estimated 565,050 ballots to count, which are mostly from people who voted by mail, the registrar reported.
“The estimate also includes ballots that are pending signature cures from voters whose signature on the Return Envelope was missing or did not match their registration record,” registrar Dean Logan said. “These voters have been notified with instructions on how to cure their ballot to be counted.”
In 2021 Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that requires ballots to be mailed to all California voters. This has resulted in a substantial number of additional mail-in ballots by people who normally would have voted in person.
The next ballot update to the public will be Wednesday.
Caruso was initially leading in early returns, but Bass slowly took the lead and expanded it in the days after the election.
The mogul is a developer of high-end Los Angeles hotels and shopping centers. He switched party affiliation from Republican to Democrat before the election and has been campaigning on a promise to clean up Los Angeles and restore a better quality of life with less homelessness and crime.
Bass, a Democrat, has served in Congress since 2011 after spending six years in the state legislature. She also has said the homeless and an increasing crime problem are top priorities.
“I am honored and grateful for the support we are continuing to see,” she tweeted Monday.
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Caruso tweeted on Nov. 10 that the race was expected to be close.
“There are hundreds of thousands of votes to count and as expected we are going to see different results each time. I continue to be cautiously optimistic about these numbers and look forward to the next series of results in the coming weeks,” he tweeted.