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The latest election results in the contest for House District 43 show Tawna Sanchez has overtaken Roberta Phillip-Robbins, reversing a narrow lead that Phillip-Robbins held since election results started rolling in Tuesday.
It's still anyone's guess how the contest will play out. Earlier in the day, Phillip-Robbins' lead narrowed to 16 votes, triggering the prospect of a recount.
As of 4 p.m. Wednesday, Sanchez held a 74-vote lead over Phillip-Robbins.
Oregon election law calls for an automatic recount in races with a margin of victory of .2 percent or less. As of now, there have been around 16,000 votes counted. If the margin slips under 32 votes, a recount will take place.
Either way, the matchup between Phillip-Robbins and Sanchez will go down as the most competitive of Portland's May 17 primary.
The two candidates were evenly matched from the beginning. Both have impressive resumes and the backing of prominent endorsers.
In recent weeks, however, news that Phillip-Robbins was ineligible to run for office while holding a federally funded job at the county reordered the race. Phillip-Robbins quit her job as a youth violence prevention specialist at Multnomah County to continue her run. But an ally of Sanchez filed an elections complaint against Phillip-Robbins alleging she illegally collected campaign contributions while she was ineligible to run under the federal Hatch Act.
Willamette Week