If you live in southern Dallas, North Dallas, and East Dallas, heads up: You probably have some unfinished civic business to attend to.
On May 6, both the Dallas City Council District 3 and the Dallas ISD District 2 races headed to runoff elections after none of the candidates received at least 50 percent of the vote. The May race attracted fewer than 9 percent of Dallas County’s 1.4 million registered voters and two-thirds of those ballots came during early voting.
Jimmy Tran and Sarah Weinberg are vying for the District 2 seat on the Dallas ISD board; current trustee Dustin Marshall announced he wouldn’t seek an additional term and endorsed Weinberg. After the May election, fellow candidate Kevin Malonson endorsed Weinberg as well, and the Dallas Morning News, which had previously endorsed Malonson, shifted its endorsement to Weinberg.
District 2 is kind of a misshapen donut that encircles the Park Cities and stretches past U.S. 75. The Hillcrest and Woodrow Wilson high school feeder patterns are within its bounds.
In the May election, Weinberg and Tran were in a dead heat for most of the night at about 38 percent of the vote each. Tran and Weinberg eventually garnered 39 and 37 percent of the vote, respectively, landing them on Saturday’s ballot.
The past three elections for that seat have ended in a runoff. In fact, Marshall only led in one general election, in 2016, to replace Mike Morath when he became the state’s education commissioner. In the 2017 and 2020 races, he did not have the most votes in the general election but won the runoff. His opponents in those years lived in East Dallas, while Marshall lives in Preston Hollow. Both candidates in the runoff live West of U.S. 75. Tran lives near Love Field and Weinberg lives in Greenway Parks. (Malonson lives in East Dallas.) In May, Tran and Weinberg each won their precincts with 51 percent and 74 percent of the vote, respectively.
The race has generated a great deal of interest and money. According to their runoff campaign finance reports filed on June 2, Weinberg had almost $100,000 in her campaign coffers and had raised $125,310. Tran had a little more than $24,000 left and raised $22,796.
In District 3 of the Dallas City Council, Zarin Gracey and Joe Tave are facing off again to see who will follow the term-limited Casey Thomas in southern Dallas. (Thomas endorsed Gracey.) In a crowded field of five candidates in May, Gracey captured about 46 percent of the vote in his district, while Tave obtained 26 percent. Tave garnered 49 percent of the vote in his precinct, and Gracey picked up 55 percent.
In their June campaign finance reports, Gracey said he had raised $838,600, while Tave reported $2,500. Gracey is running for the first time, while Tave has run for the same seat five times.
If turnout is abysmal in May municipal elections, it’s even more so in June runoffs. At the end of early voting Tuesday, 9,606 had cast early ballots, and not quite 500 had returned mail-in ballots. The only early polling place in Dallas District 3, Mountain Creek Library, reported 395 votes as of Tuesday. The two polling places within Dallas ISD District 2—Our Redeemer Lutheran Church and the Oak Lawn Library—reported 2,898 and 872, respectively. (There are more polling places open in or near those districts Saturday.)
You can vote from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday at any of these locations. Need to refresh your memory on the candidates? Here is our primer.
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