Update Friday, 5:21 p.m.: Alameda County has released its vote totals for the day, and Oakland housing activist Carroll Fife is maintaining a robust lead in her attempt to unseat two-term incumbent Lynette McElhaney in the race for the Oakland City Council District 3 seat.
Fife has increased her lead over McElhaney to 3,563 votes in the ranked-choice voting contest. She now has 49% of the vote to McElhaney’s 31%.
As a councilmember, McElhaney has focused on public safety and decreasing violence in the city. Her son, a student at the University of Southern California, was fatally shot in Los Angeles last year, the second time she had lost someone close to gun violence; a teenager whom she helped raise was shot and killed in Oakland in 2015.
Fife, director of the Oakland chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, helped organize Moms 4 Housing, the occupation of a long-vacant West Oakland house by two mothers as a protest against housing speculation and the city’s homelessness crisis.
She has called for public funding of housing, tenant protections, reallocation of funds from the police to violence prevention programs, and initiatives around climate and environmental justice.
— Jon Brooks (@jbrooksfoy)