Bass Pulls Ahead Of Caruso In Latest LA Mayor's Race Vote Tally

LOS ANGELES, CA — Three days after election night ended with Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso 12,000 votes ahead of Rep. Karen Bass, a newly released vote tally shows Bass in the lead by more than 4,000 votes Friday.

As the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's office makes its way through ballots returned by mail through election day as well as the ballots mailed on election day and since received, the already tight race has switched back and forth with both Bass and Caruso taking the lead. However, the vote-by-mail ballots have been coming in lopsided in Bass's favor.

As of Friday, Bass has 50.38 percent of the vote compared to Caruso's 49.62. So far Bass has garnered 289,782 to Caruso's 285,398 votes.

It remains a tight race, and vote counting could continue into December

Before Friday's tally update, Caruso led Bass by just under 2,700 votes.

An additional 134,099 vote-by-mail ballots returned through Election Day were added to the countywide vote count Thursday afternoon, bringing the total ballots counted to 1,452,192.

The estimated number of outstanding ballots to be processed as of Thursday was 883,300 including 862,000 vote-by-mail ballots, 21,000 conditional voter registration ballots and 300 provisional ballots.

The bulk of Vote by Mail ballots included in the estimate were received through Election Day by mail or returned in person at a Ballot Drop Box or Vote Center, according to the Registrar's office.
The number of outstanding Vote by Mail ballots will increase as ballots postmarked by Election Day are received through Tuesday — one week after the election. Ballots received after Tuesday will not be counted.

Further updates will be announced every Tuesday and Friday until all ballots are tallied. A winner might not be determined for days or even weeks.

"As predicted, this is a close race," Caruso said. "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."

Sarah Leonard Sheahan, Bass' communications director, said in a statement following the results Thursday 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.

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 over $100 million -- much of it from Caruso's own fortune -- to propel him into contention.

The winner will inherit leadership of a city grappling with 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.

Caruso has connected the scandal to claims that the city political system is broken -- exacerbating issues such as homelessness and crime. He painted himself as the candidate of change, blaming a failure of leadership for the City Hall scandal.

"People are spending more time protecting themselves and protecting their jobs than working for the residents of the city," Caruso said during the final mayoral debate on Oct. 11. "This is why we have crime out of control."

Bass said at the debate that she would make sure Los Angeles rejects "the politics of divide and conquer." Bass, who finished nearly 8 percentage points ahead of Caruso in the June primary, has sought to frame her opponent's campaign as one driven solely by Caruso's wallet.

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.