Updated at 8:46pm June 24.
Google engineer Anthony Tordillos was leading Latina women's advocate Gabby Chavez-Lopez by nearly a 2-1 margin, more than 2,000 votes. tonight in early counting of votes in the San Jose City Council District 3 runoff election.
The tally reported at 8:45pm showed Tordillos with 4,449 votes, and Chavez-Lopez with 2,413 votes, representing 14.62% of the downtown district's registered voters.
On Election Day, Tordillos posted this on his campaign Facebook page:
“I’m in this race because I’m tired of the excuses, special interests, and same old battles that are getting us nowhere. I will bring a fresh approach to District 3 and tackle public safety head-on, combat our affordability and homelessness crises, and end the excuses.”
Because most ballots were cast by mail rather than in person, a new tally will be announced each day until July 1, the final day for mail ballots to be processed. Polls at three voting centers in the downtown district closed at 8pm. The registrar of voters will process all eligible vote-by-mail ballots received by July 1, provided they are postmarked on or before Election Day.
Updated results will be posted at 5:pm daily throughout the week and then every other day at 5pm until all ballots are counted. These updates will include additional vote-by-mail ballots as well as provisional ballots.
Tuesday ended a frenetic final two weeks of the runoff election, required when none of the seven original candidates failed to obtain a majority in the April 6 special election. Chavez-Lopez led that ballot with 30%, and Tordillos scored an upset victory for the second runoff spot when a recount showed he was six votes ahead of San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan's assistant chief of staff, Matthew Quevedo. Each had the support of 22% of voters.
Tordillo was endorsed by Mahan in the runoff ballot, and a victory by the Yale graduate over Chavez-Lopez, a Santa Clara University alum, would thwart a move to labor-backed progressives to possibly interrupt the mayor's more moderate agenda.
A Chavez-Lopez win would add a fifth solid progressive, pro-labor vote to the 10-member council. Tordillo's swing vote could be a mixed bag.
Tordillo, chair of the city's planning commission, won with solid support of real estate developers and the tech sector. The high-powered centrist Common Good Silicon Valley PAC shifted its support from Quevedo to Tordillos. But Tordillos also has strong neighborhood roots and his own stable of labor unions.
In the campaign's final days, for example, the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council Power PAC donated $25,000 and the plumbers and steamfitters union chipped in $5,000 to a new PAC, Californian's Working Together to Support Tordillo for City Council 2025 that spent $30,000 on the Tordillos campaign.
Tordillos also had strong support from LBGT groups. If elected, he would be San Jose's third gay council member.
The Tordillos campaign in the final days continued to attempt, as Quevedo had attempted in the initial special election, to labor Chavez-Lopez as a “PG&E Puppet” even though her campaign was largely funded by organized labor led by the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, because PG&& had been one of a dozen corporate donors to a PAC that in late 2024 spent money on campaigns for Latino/Latina candidates.
The ballot counting could end earlier than usual because of the extremely low turnout. Election officials estimate that about 20% of District 3's 47,189 registered voters cast ballots.
A final flurry of text messages, mailers and social media advertising aimed to boost turnout for one candidate or the other in the final days was paid for by final boosts in campaign spending by the two candidates.
Tordillos – who financed his own initial special election campaign with his own money and no PAC money – outspent Chavez-Lopez and added four sizable PACs nearly matched her South Bay Labor Council support in the final two-month campaign.
The big labor PAC – which had front-loaded its support for Chavez-Lopez by spending $379,02 in the first four-month campaign – mustered $156,140 in spending for her in the final two-months, with $112,079 spent in the final two-week sprint. Government employees, firefighters, teamsters electricians and sheet metal workers all joined to support her.
But Tordillos got the endorsement of the powerful San Jose Police Officers Association.
His campaign spent $351,364 in the two-month runoff campaign, which included $73,710 of his own money. Four PACs kicked in $96,959 in spending for the Tordillos campaign.
The Chavez-Lopez campaign spent $117,404 in the post-April 6 campaign, and benefited from $156,140 in labor PAC spending in the same period.
