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City of Fremont · Statewide General Election

Fremont City Council, District 3

Draft candidate list — early preview until the state’s official list publishes on August 27, 2026.

This is one contest. Enter your address to see every race on your November ballot, and keep track of your picks.

On the ballot

This person would hold one of six district seats on the Fremont City Council -- Alameda County's largest city, with about 230,000 residents -- alongside a separately, citywide-elected Mayor, under a council-manager government with an appointed City Manager. A 4-year term, decided by whichever candidate gets the most votes -- no ranked-choice voting is documented for Fremont.

Incumbent Kathy Kimberlin faces one challenger, senior engineering manager Vipin Sharma, for Fremont's District 3 (Centerville) council seat.

This person would hold one of six district seats on the Fremont City Council -- Alameda County's largest city, with about 230,000 residents -- alongside a separately, citywide-elected Mayor, under a council-manager government with an appointed City Manager. A 4-year term, decided by whichever candidate gets the most votes; no ranked-choice voting is documented for Fremont.

The county's own candidate-filing system marks Kimberlin's "Incumbent" field "N," the same self-report quirk this dataset has found unreliable elsewhere in Alameda County -- Fremont's own city government page independently confirms she is the sitting District 3 councilmember. NetFile's committee records show Kimberlin has run for this seat before, with committees on file dating back to 2016.

Kathy Kimberlin

Kathy Kimberlin has lived in Fremont's Centerville neighborhood for more than 40 years. She began volunteering as a Fremont Unified parent for eight years, later co-founding the Tri-City Non-Profit Coalition, serving as president of the Fremont Education Foundation, and serving as a past president of the Centerville Business & Community Association; she also spent 12 years on the Fremont Chamber of Commerce's Government Affairs Committee reviewing legislative proposals. As District 3's councilmember she cites working with city staff on neighborhood design guidelines for the Glenmoor area and on the Centerville Unified Site collaboration between residents and a developer. Professionally, she is the Fremont Field Director for Alameda County Supervisor David Haubert (District 1), coordinating resources for Fremont's small businesses, seniors, the unhoused, and uninsured residents.

Strengths

Decades of Centerville-based civic and nonprofit leadership, plus current work coordinating county services for Fremont residents through her day job for the county supervisor.

Trade-offs

Her day job as a county supervisor's field director is a different level of government than her council seat; no independent reporting weighing any conflict-of-interest question was found.

Keep in mind

Her campaign committee's H1 2026 fundraising was funded in part by a $5,000 loan from her husband -- a real, filed disclosure, not evidence about the size of her broader donor base.

Vipin Sharma

Vipin Sharma's ballot designation is Senior Engineering Manager. His campaign committee, filed under the name "vipin4fremont," has so far filed only a Form 501 candidate-intention statement (Aug. 3, 2026); no Form 460 disclosing contributions or spending was on file for him as of this dataset's retrieval, and no independent biography or news coverage was found beyond his ballot designation.

Strengths

A private-sector engineering-management background distinct from the incumbent's nonprofit and government-adjacent career.

Trade-offs

No fundraising record yet and no independent information beyond his ballot designation, making his platform and priorities hard to assess from public records alone.

Keep in mind

A Form 501 without a Form 460 is an early-stage filing -- it establishes his candidacy but does not yet disclose any contributions or spending.

Source review: Strong (86/100) · 5 cited sources

Official records anchor this contest, with multiple sources checked.

  • alamedacountyca.gov (opens in a new tab)Alameda County Registrar of Voters -- official Candidate List system (electionId 260, "General Election - 11/03/2026 (Official)"), queried directly via its own JSON API (GET /rov_app/racelist/260/600) for the City category: names all three Fremont races (raceIds 115-117) -- For Member Of City Council #2/#3/#4, Fremont -- alongside the other 43 Alameda County city races countywide, and confirms Fremont has no mayoral race this cycle.
  • alamedacountyca.gov (opens in a new tab)Alameda County Registrar of Voters -- official Candidate List system, queried directly via its own POST-based HTML API (POST /rov_app/candidatelist/) for all three Fremont races, each flagged "Vote For: 1" and "On Ballot": For Member Of City Council #2 -- Desrie Campbell ("Councilmember/Healthcare Director") and Keith Parker ("Marketing Director"); #3 -- Kathy Kimberlin ("County Field Director") and Vipin Sharma ("Senior Engineering Manager"); #4 -- Aziz Akbari ("Director, Alameda County Water District"), Ying Min Li ("Small Business Owner"), Anurag Mishra ("Technical Leader"), and Manisha Pathak ("Educator/Nonprofit Executive"). The system's own "Incumbent" detail field reads "N" for every candidate including Campbell and Kimberlin, who Fremont's own city government page confirms are sitting councilmembers -- this dataset does not treat that field as reliable.
  • web.archive.org (opens in a new tab)City of Fremont -- "Mayor & City Council" page, read via the Internet Archive's July 23, 2026 snapshot after fremont.gov itself returned HTTP 403 to every direct fetch attempted in this pass: names every sitting councilmember by district -- Teresa Keng (District 1), Desrie Campbell (District 2), Kathy Kimberlin (District 3), Yang Shao (District 4), Vice Mayor Yajing Zhang (District 5), and Raymond Liu (District 6) -- plus Mayor Raj Salwan, sworn in December 2024. Independently confirms Campbell and Kimberlin as genuine incumbents in their Nov. 2026 races and that Yang Shao, not a candidate for reelection, is the outgoing District 4 officeholder.
  • netfile.com (opens in a new tab)City of Fremont's own NetFile-hosted public campaign-finance portal (agency code FRE), queried directly via its own QuickNameSearch and filings/byFiler|byCandidate JSON API for every 2026 city council candidate, with each located candidate's actual H1 2026 FPPC Form 460 (or, where none existed, the most recent filing on record) downloaded directly via the portal's own CampaignDocuments/download endpoint and read for its real reported totals. Desrie Campbell (D2) $800 raised / $40 spent; Keith Parker (D2) no 2026 committee, only a 2022 one; Kathy Kimberlin (D3) $200 raised / $1,966.08 spent, including a $5,000 loan from her husband; Vipin Sharma (D3) only a Form 501 on file, no Form 460; Aziz Akbari (D4) $288 raised / $10.09 spent plus $1,107 in accrued unpaid bills; Ying-Min Li (D4) $50,060.88 in monetary contributions plus $80,000 in loans from Li herself / $13,932.33 spent, including an $850 contribution from sitting District 4 Councilmember Yang Shao; Manisha Pathak (D4) $4,091 raised / $1,395.06 spent; Anurag Mishra (D4) no campaign committee located.
  • en.wikipedia.org (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia's Fremont, California article -- 2020 census population (230,504), the fourth most populous city in the Bay Area and the largest in Alameda County; also lists the current City Council roster by name, used only as a secondary cross-check against the city's own page.

Last updated September 1, 2026.