With all votes counted, here are the results of the local primary elections

The final tallies from Tuesday’s local primary are in, after over a thousand absentee mail-in ballots poured into the Olmsted County election office in the past two days. The ‘top twos’ from Tuesday night remain the same, meaning we know who will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Kathleen Harrington and Brooke Carlson will advance to the general election in the race for the at-large City Council seat. Harrington finished with the overall lead in votes with 7,735, but lost half a percentage point of her total vote share (42.6 to 42.1 percent). Brooke Carlson’s vote share did not change, finishing with 35.1 percent (6,446 votes). Vangie Castro gained half a percentage point from the roughly 1,300 mail-in at-large votes processed after Tuesday, but it was much too little to keep their candidacy afloat. They finish with 4,181 votes, good for 22.8 percent of the vote.

Michael Wojcik and Mark Bransford will move on in the race for the Ward 2 seat, with roughly 43 and 38 percent of the vote, respectively. Denise Welte will bow out of the race having earned 17.6 percent of the final tally.

In the race to replace Mark Bilderback in Ward 4, Kelly Rae Kirkpatrick and Katrina Pulham will move on. Kirkpatrick earned the highest percentage of votes for any candidate in any city race, with nearly half the 1,868 votes cast (921 / 49.3 percent). Pulham will advance to the general election by 58 votes (roughly 3 percentage points) over PJ Calkins.

The closest margin of advancement in any ward came in Ward 6, where Craig Ugland took the second spot over Donavan Bailey by just over two percentage points (23.9 to 21.7 percent). Molly Dennis took first place with 33.2 percent of the vote, meaning she will face Ugland in November.

In the Olmsted County District 5 Commissioner race, Regina Mustafa will move on to face incumbent Jim Bier in November. Mustafa finished ahead of Brian Morgan by 81 votes (957 vs. 856, or 29.0 vs. 26.5 percent). Bier handily took the overall vote lead with 1,470 votes — good for 44.5 percent of the vote.

Voter turnout finished at 25.9 percent — with roughly 96,000 registered voters in Olmsted County, it means about 25,000 people voted in the August 11 primary. County election officials say 71 percent of all ballots came absentee, whether they came through the mail or were dropped off at the county’s election headquarters.

Read the final results on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website. We will have more analysis of the local primary on Friday’s edition of the Rochester Rundown.

Cover graphic: Canva