By Petaluma Voice

Updates will be posted as they become available.

In the race for Sonoma County District 2 supervisor, Joanna Paun leads Sylvia Lemus 62% to 38% with all 85 precincts reporting and 17,383 votes counted as of 1:42 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 4.

The precincts represent only a portion of the overall votes, as many mail-in ballots have yet to be counted.

There are 67,719 registered voters in Sonoma County District 2. With a 70% turnout, about 47,400 total votes would be expected in the race.

Paun is a Petaluma City Schools board member and Lemus is a Cotati City Council member and mayor.

Political contributions in the race exploded in the week before the election, pushing the combined total for the two candidates past $680,000. The record for spending on the District 2 seat was set in 2010, when eventual winner David Rabbitt and Pamela Torliatt, a former Petaluma City Council member and mayor, tallied a sum of $706,000.

Late last week, flyers mailed to voters by a political action committee supporting Paun raised questions about Lemus serving on the same nonprofit board as a disgraced Catholic priest who was defrocked after being suspected of sexually abusing children. Lemus told Petaluma Voice she was unaware of the accusations and did not work closely with the former priest, while Brian Sobel, a Petaluma-based political analyst, called the flyer's claims "a stretch" and "outrageous."

Earlier in mid-October, Lemus and Paun issued a joint statement in response to the escalation of ongoing threats they said they’d received during their campaigns. Paun, a Black woman, and Lemus, a Mexican-American woman, released the statement after Paun’s team “received a threat of violence following months of increasingly disturbing, racially motivated messages.”

The winner of the supervisorial contest will be either the first Black woman or the first Latina — and the first person of color — to hold the District 2 seat. One of them will also be the first woman to hold the position since Helen Putnam’s death in 1984.

Sonoma County District 2 includes Petaluma, Cotati, parts of Rohnert Park, an area south of Sebastopol, and the unincorporated communities of Bloomfield, Penngrove, and Two Rock.

Representatives on the five-member Sonoma County Board of Supervisors oversee the county budget, legislation and policy, land use and planning, and public services. The board's jurisdiction also includes the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, Sonoma Water, and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office.

Supervisors serve four-year terms with a base pay of approximately $173,000.