Absentee voting has Solis with big lead in L.A. County supervisor race

The first round of Los Angeles County voting results released Tuesday night showed former U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis with a commanding lead in the race for one open seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, Sheila Kuehl and Bobby Shriver were leading six other challengers in the race for a second seat.

Solis had 66% of the vote in the race to replace longtime Supervisor Gloria Molina in the first round of vote-by-mail ballots posted, with opponents Juventino “J” Gomez, an El Monte city councilman, and April Saucedo Hood, a school police officer, trailing with 20% and 14% respectively.

In the race for Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s seat, former state lawmaker Kuehl was in the lead with 35% of the vote, followed by former Santa Monica city councilman and Kennedy family member Bobby Shriver with 30% and West Hollywood City Councilman John Duran with 15%.

To win outright in the primary without advancing to a runoff, a candidate must garner 50% plus one vote.

In the race for county assessor, Jeffrey Prang, a second West Hollywood city councilman who also works in the assessor’s office, and prosecutor John Morris were leading the field of 12 candidates, with 17% and 15% of the vote respectively.

As of 7 p.m., Los Angeles County elections officials estimated turnout at less than 15%, based on a sampling of precincts. That’s low even for a primary election, when turnout typically lags.

The first ballot count included 256,813 vote-by-mail ballots out of about 1.5 million issued, with 18.78% of eligible registered vote-by-mail voters casting ballots.