Gary Singh continues to hold a commanding lead to become Manteca’s ninth directly elected mayor.

With 35.6 percent of all votes cast in the election countywide counted, the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters posted an updated tally early Tuesday evening.

Singh, as the count continues, is still getting 1 of every 2 votes cast.

Singh now has 50.11 percent (8,646 votes) of the running tally. Lei Ann Larson is in second with 25.09 percent (4,328 votes) while incumbent Ben Cantu is third with 24.80 percent (4,279 votes).

Manteca started the direct election of mayors in 1980. Prior to that, council members decided among themselves every two years who would serve as mayor.

The count is expected to take an additional week or more to complete due to the large number of mail-in and drop-off ballots that need to have signatures verified before  they can be tallied.

Countywide, 18.6  percent or 137,296 of the 385,678 votes cast had been counted. There is no way of knowing exactly how many ballots are left to count in the Manteca’s mayor’s race.

But to give you an idea, there have been 17,263 ballots counted so far in the Manteca mayor’s contest.

There were 46,329 registered voters in Manteca as of July 2022.

Voter  turnout is considered good if 60 percent of those registered cast ballots. If that occurred it would translate into 28,000 voters being cast this time around. There were 21,000 votes tabulated for the mayor’s race in the 2018 election

If turnout is 60 percent, that means there would be roughly 11,000 ballots still to counted from Manteca. As such it is highly unlikely that either Larson or Cantu will be able to overtake Singh. That’s because he would need to see no  more than only 1 of every four votes go his way and either Cantu or Larson would need to collect all of the remaining votes.

In the District 4 race, Mike Morowit has been returned to the council after a four-year absence with 84.28 percent (4,348 votes) of the ballots in his favor. His challenger Nancy Watson was at 15.72 percent (811) votes).

Dave Breitenbucher ran unopposed for the District 3 seat. He had 2,552 votes as of Tuesday.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com