Only 335 votes separate candidates David Vahedi (left) and Paul Koretz.
(Vahedi photo by C.J. Dablo; Koretz photo courtesy the campaign)

With only hundreds of votes separating the candidates in the election to fill the Fifth District Los Angeles City Council seat, candidate David Vahedi was not ready to concede a loss to opponent Paul Koretz at the Tuesday election night party at the Bourbon Street Shrimp and Grille near Westwood.

For several hours at the back of the restaurant, a crowd of enthusiastic volunteers waited by the luminescence of a giant television screen displaying Excel spreadsheets and the Los Angeles county clerk's website as the precinct election results began to trickle in.  

Not far away, at the Stone Fire Pizza Company on La Cienega Boulevard, Koretz and his supporters waited and watched as
their initially sizable lead dwindled to less than a single percentage point.

For most of the evening, Koretz kept an early lead of more than 700 votes ahead of Vahedi.  At one point Koretz's lead widened to 1000 votes.  But shortly before 1:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, Vahedi closed the gap as the majority of the precincts began to call in their numbers.  After about 80 percent of the precincts reported their results, Vahedi's totals came within one percentage point of his opponent.  The race became too close to call.

In this runoff election, the winner needs 50 percent of the vote plus one. As of Wednesday morning, the L.A. County Clerk's office reported Paul Koretz carried the district with 50.53 percent of the vote, edging out underdog Vahedi by a mere 335 votes.

A tired Vahedi with a yellow striped tie slung over his white shirt expressed his gratitude to his supporters who "wanted a different city of L.A."   

"I'm incredibly grateful for them going on the journey with me.  We'll see what happens," Vahedi said, indicating that it could take some time before a conclusive winner is announced.  

"We'll all just have to wait three weeks," Vahedi said.

Koretz also acknowledged that there is no reason to assume anything this early in the game.

"I'm a little bit nervous after a two-year campaign,
but I'm very excited about it and it was a hard-fought race. Both sides
ran a strong campaign, and we'll just see,'' Koretz said in an
interview with NBC-4 as the votes were being counted Tuesday night.

But Koretz's campaign consultant, Parke Skelton, doesn't believe Vahedi has much to wait for.

"I think, if you want to put a protractor to my head, I think our lead will grow a little bit as the provisionals are counted. Not by much, but probably by about a hundred votes or so," Skelton said in a phone conversation early Wednesday afternoon.

The remaining provisional and absentee ballots will be counted and verified over the next month, and the results of the election are due to the California Secretary of state for verification by June 15.

According to estimates from the Koretz campaign, Vahedi will have to lead Koretz by 8 percent of the remaining ballots in order to take the lead and secure a victory.

Marcia Ventura, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office, said there are at least 82,000 ballots from the election that remain to be counted. However, only a portion of those ballots will be from Fifth District constituents, and because the ballots are not separated according to municipal districts, there is no way to confirm how many votes remain to be counted in this neck-and-neck runoff.

"It's not over till the fat person sings," an optimistic Vahedi supporter
repeated several times on Pico Boulevard as the Vahedi election party
came to a close.

The voter turnout for the Fifth District city council runoff was slightly more than 18 percent, which was about 7 percentage points lower than Skelton and the Koretz campaign had expected. And it is only slightly higher than the overall turnout of the May 19 elections, which was 17.4 percent in Los Angeles County. Skelton speculated that the lower voter turnout contributed to the closeness of the race.

"With a low turnout like that for the district, it makes the turnout more Republican, more conservative. It usually means that it was mostly people motivated by anti-tax conservatism, and Vahedi had kind of been campaigning as the more Republican-friendly candidate," Skelton said.

Republican-friendly or no, Vahedi acknowledged that Koretz carried most of the political endorsements, especially because of his previous position in the State Assembly. "So, you know, the question is, did the voters go with the same team that we've had in place or did we want to go with fresh air?"

Vahedi's supporters were happy to retain their underdog status as the vote tally narrowed.

"So, I'm not really surprised that it ended this close tonight," Vahedi campaign volunteer Courtney Schoenwald said. "We're still optimistic."