Low beats Simitian by 5 votes in recount of House primary
Assembly Member Evan Low is advancing to the November general election in a South Bay House race after a recount Wednesday showed him defeating Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian by five votes. The initial primary election results showed the two in an unprecedented tie.
Low will face former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who was the leading votegetter in the race to succeed Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo, who is retiring from Congress. Low and Liccardo are both Democrats.
In California, the top two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. In the event of a tie, three candidates advance. And that’s what happened as both Low and Simitian finished with 30,249 votes, or 16.6% of the total, in the race among 11 candidates.
A tie had never happened in a House race since the top-two system started in 2012, according to the California secretary of state’s office. Two write-in candidates tied for second place in a 2016 Los Angeles-area Assembly race, though that wasn’t quite as extraordinary: They had 32 votes apiece.
“My team and I knew that succeeding the esteemed Anna Eshoo would be challenging, so we see a race ending in a tie followed by a recount as character building for your next representative in Congress,” Low posted Wednesday on X.
The recount was requested by Jonathan Padilla, a tech entrepreneur and former Liccardo mayoral campaign staffer who donated $1,000 to Liccardo’s congressional campaign. He formed an independent expenditure committee called Count the Vote that spent $300,000 for a machine recount in both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
Padilla told KQED that “I have not spoken to Mr. Liccardo about this; I have not spoken to anybody in the campaign about this. I’ve had no meaningful contact with anybody in the Liccardo campaign since I made my donation at the end of December.”
In an opinion piece in San Jose Inside, Liccardo wrote that “I did not request this recount. Neither I nor anyone in my campaign has communicated with Padilla or his donors about the recount.”