Democrats nominated incumbent Satyendra Huja and newcomers Kathleen Galvin and Dede Smith for City Council yesterday, Charlottesville Tomorrow reports, and ousted three-term clerk of court incumbent Paul Garrett in favor of challenger Llezelle Dugger. A record 2,524 Democrats voted in the all-day firehouse primary. Huja and Galvin were both clear preferences of a majority of voters—winning on the first ballot—but it took five rounds of counting via instant-runoff voting before Smith finally emerged as the third-most-popular candidate, narrowly beating Paul Beyer by 31 votes.
The three Democrats nominated for Council will now run against the five independent candidates (Republicans have yet again failed to put forth challengers) for the November election. Nobody else is running for clerk, making Dugger the presumptive winner.
6:30 PM Update: The unofficial tallies have been released. These are the numbers for council, and these are the numbers for clerk. What stands out here is that Dugger trounced Garrett and fellow challenger Pam Melampy, with 1,534 votes to Garrett’s 656 and Melampy’s 294. The numbers from the council race show that all three nominees were also the top three vote-getters in the first round of voting, indicating that the results may not have been different with a traditional balloting system.
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