Incumbent City Council member Kitty Moore leads the race for the 2024 Cupertino City Council election, with 25.13% of the vote, according to the Santa Clara County’s Registrar of Voters. Her closest opponent, Ray Wang, trails by 6.57 percentage points and 2,701 votes against Moore with 18.57% of the vote. Behind Wang is Rod Sinks, with 18.42%, trails Wang by 0.14 percentage points and 60 votes. Incumbent Hung Wei trails Sinks by 1.12 percentage points and 463 votes, with 17.29%. The other candidates — Gilbert Wong, Barry Chang and Claudio Bono — all have less than 10 percent of the vote.

The top two candidates of the election win seats in the five-seat council, as two out of three seats are up for election this year.

While Moore led by a wide margin early in the vote-counting process and is currently favored to win the first seat, the race is razor-thin for the second seat. 2,500 ballots remain unprocessed out of a total of 764,769 ballots cast in the Santa Clara County for the Nov. 5 election, causing the results to be unpredictable.

The 2,500 unprocessed ballots are divided into two categories: Conditional Voter Registration Ballots and Challenged Ballots.

Conditional Voter Registration Ballots, also known as Same Day Voter Registration Ballots, are cast by voters who missed the voter registration deadline, which was Oct. 21 this year. California law allows these citizens to register in the 14 days preceding Election Day or on Election Day. These make up approximately 1,000 of the unprocessed ballots. Challenged Ballots require additional review prior to being processed into the count. A common reason is having put a signature that is not an exact match on the ballot — voters may need to take action to cure their vote or no action may be required. These make up approximately 1,500 of the unprocessed ballots.

This story will continue to be updated as votes are processed.