Two hours after the close of voting, Santa Fe does not know who its next mayor will be. Unofficial election results posted at 12 polling places in Santa Fe show no candidate in the mayor's race likely finished with more than 50 percent of votes in today's contest.
That means the real news about the winners is expected to come from City Clerk Yolanda Vigil after she conducts instant-runoff calculations with Dominion voting machines in the city's first run of its new ranked-choice balloting system.
SFR will post more stories as Vigil makes announcements.
Ballot box tapes were posted at 12 polling places; the last results coming in Salazar Elementary School, where polling officials said they were "still counting ballots" at 9:15 pm.
Results from 7,200 in-person early and absentee ballots were reported at City Hall just before 9:30, leaving about 700 unreported absentee ballots remaining. Those results, combined with election day results showed Alan Webber in the lead with about 39 percent of votes, followed by Ron Trujillo with 24, then Kate Noble with 23. Joseph Maestas has 8 percent of first-round votes.
It appears Peter Ives, who has about 6 percent of election day available votes, will be the first candidate eliminated from the race. Under the new ballot system rules, the second choice from those voters will be added to the first-round totals for the remaining four candidates.
The tapes only showed counts for first-place rankings.
Turnout in the election so far appears to be about 37 percent, with about 12,600 voters casting a ballot on election day. There are 54,155 registered voters in the city.
SFR will update this story.
