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Bass widens lead over Caruso as vote count nears second week
According to the latest returns, Rep. Karen Bass widened her lead over Rick Caruso for LA mayor, but there are still hundreds of thousands of votes to count.
LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles County continues to count ballots as Angelenos await the outcome of some of the most important races in the county.
On Monday, the LA County Registrar-Recorder's office reported that Karen Bass had expanded her lead over Rick Caruso in the latest ballot count. Bass now holds a lead of more than 29,000 votes, according to newly updated returns.
Meanwhile, in the Sheriff's race, challenger and former Long Beach Police chief Robert Luna is slowly increasing his lead in his bid to unseat incumbent Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Updated returns released Monday show Luna with nearly 60% of the vote, compared to 40% for Villanueva. Luna had a lead of 324,837 votes, up from 259,184 when the last update was released on Saturday.
Hundreds of thousands of countywide ballots still remain uncounted, however, and a winner might not be determined for days or even weeks. It was unclear how many of the uncounted votes are from voters in the city of Los Angeles.
The last four updates after Election Day have all resulted in gains for Bass, who took the lead in the vote count on Friday and has expanded it since.
The next update will be released Tuesday afternoon, according to election officials.
Sarah Leonard Sheahan, Bass' communications director, said in a statement after Thursday's results that the campaign was confident Bass would eventually prevail.
"In the coming days, the voice of the people of Los Angeles will be heard and we feel confident that we will win," Sheahan said.
"As predicted, this is a close race," Caruso said on Thursday. "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."
Bass, a six-term member of Congress, is seeking to become the first woman and only the second Black person to lead Los Angeles. Caruso, a billionaire developer, is looking to win a campaign that's on track to spend more than $100 million -- much of it from Caruso's own fortune -- to propel him into office.
The winner will inherit leadership of a city grappling with a worsening homelessness crisis and a scandal that has embroiled City Hall for the past month, after three council members and a top county labor official took part in a leaked conversation in October 2021 that included racist comments and attempts to manipulate redistricting.
You can click here for the latest update shared by LA County.
ELECTION LATEST
To keep up with the latest on the midterm election, FOX 11 has a live results tracker of the key California races. There is also a live tracker for gubernatorial races across the U.S. You can click here for the latest on the national races.
CNS contributed to this report.