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City of Sunnyvale · Statewide General Election

Sunnyvale 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 your district's seat on Sunnyvale's 7-member City Council: city ordinances, the budget, and land use in this Santa Clara County city of about 156,000, alongside a separately elected, citywide Mayor (Larry Klein, elected 2020 and reelected 2024, not on this ballot) and five other district Councilmembers. A 4-year term. Six of the seven seats are elected from individual districts on staggered terms -- Districts 1, 3, and 5 are up this cycle; Districts 2, 4, and 6 (last elected 2024) aren't.

Only one candidate is running for this seat. Incumbent Murali Srinivasan, who won District 3 in 2022 by a single vote after a recount produced an exact tie, appears unopposed for a second term — so this contest looks settled and your vote here is unlikely to change the outcome.

Sunnyvale elects six of its seven City Council seats by district, each to a 4-year term, on a staggered schedule: District 3's seat was last on the ballot in 2022 and is up again this cycle alongside Districts 1 and 5. A citywide-elected Mayor (Larry Klein, not on this ballot) and five other district Councilmembers round out the council; day-to-day operations run through an appointed city manager.

With no opponent, the useful question is not who to choose but what the officeholder has done since one of the closest local elections in the Bay Area. Srinivasan's 2022 race against Justin Wang came down to an exact tie after a county recount, broken only when the City Clerk drew his name from a bag at a public ceremony.

Murali Srinivasan

Murali Srinivasan has represented District 3 since winning the seat by tiebreaker in January 2023, after the closest possible margin: an election-night one-vote lead over Justin Wang narrowed to an exact tie once a county recount validated three previously discounted ballots. He was born in Bangalore, India, immigrated to the U.S. in 1984, and has volunteered since 2022 with Friends for Life, a senior-services nonprofit; he has since served a term as the council's rotating Vice Mayor. "I'm really happy for District 3 voters in Sunnyvale, because the uncertainty and anxiety of not knowing who their representative is was a bad thing," he said after the tiebreaker. No independent news coverage of his council votes or record beyond the 2022-23 election and his volunteer work was found in this pass.

Strengths

A full term of council experience, including a stint as Vice Mayor, and a well-documented public record of both his election and his community volunteering.

Trade-offs

No independent reporting on his votes or legislative priorities in office was found in this pass beyond the 2022-23 election story and volunteer-work coverage.

Keep in mind

This pass could not reach the county's own certified Nov. 2026 candidate list directly. The unopposed call here rests on the city's own election-page language plus a citywide finance search that found no rival committee — not a certified roster.

Source review: Strong (83/100) · 7 cited sources

Official records anchor this contest, with several source types checked for context.

  • sunnyvale.ca.gov (opens in a new tab)City of Sunnyvale -- City Clerk's Elections page: confirmed only through a search-engine cache snippet in this pass (sunnyvale.ca.gov returned HTTP 403 to every direct fetch attempt, including its own robots.txt). The snippet states "Voters will elect councilmembers for these seats in the Nov. 3, 2026, election: District 1, District 3 and District 5," and separately, "On Aug. 22, 2022, City Council appointed Linda Sell to District 1 in lieu of holding an election. Sell will start her term on Jan. 3, 2023 along with the Councilmembers elected to Districts 3 and 5 in November."
  • en.wikipedia.org (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia -- "Sunnyvale, California": council-manager charter government, 7-member Council (a Mayor directly elected citywide to a 4-year term since a Nov. 2020 charter change, plus six Councilmembers elected from individual districts to 4-year terms); 2020 census population 155,805, 2025 Census Bureau estimate 156,577; names Larry Klein as Mayor and Richard Mehlinger as Vice Mayor.
  • svvoice.com (opens in a new tab)Silicon Valley Voice (svvoice.com) -- "Sunnyvale Finalizes Council District Map, Election Sequencing": read in full. The Council approved district map 120D and set Districts 2, 4, and 6 to first elect in Nov. 2020 and Districts 1, 3, and 5 in Nov. 2022 -- the schedule this dataset uses to confirm Districts 1, 3, and 5 (each on a 4-year term) are up again in Nov. 2026.
  • svvoice.com (opens in a new tab)Silicon Valley Voice (svvoice.com) -- "Sunnyvale Council Candidate Wins by One Vote": read in full. Reports Murali Srinivasan defeated Justin Wang for the District 3 seat 2,813 votes to 2,812 on election night (a margin that triggered a mandatory recount) and that Richard Mehlinger won the District 5 seat outright with over 70% of the vote, while Linda Sell was appointed unopposed to District 1.
  • sanjosespotlight.com (opens in a new tab)San José Spotlight (a nonprofit newsroom) -- "Murali Srinivasan wins tiebreaker for Sunnyvale City Council": read in full. Reports that the election-night one-vote margin narrowed to an exact tie after the Santa Clara County Registrar validated three previously discounted ballots on a second recount, and that City Clerk David Carnahan broke the tie by drawing Srinivasan's name from a bag at a Jan. 3, 2023 public ceremony at Sunnyvale City Hall, with on-the-record quotes from both Srinivasan (then 65) and Wang (then 26).
  • greatersunnyvale.com (opens in a new tab)Greater Sunnyvale (greatersunnyvale.com) -- "Seating Our Most Diverse City Council, Sunnyvale Enters 2023": read in full. Profiles the three council members seated Jan. 3, 2023 -- Linda Sell (District 1, the city's first female Asian American Councilmember, prioritizing environmental sustainability, school resources, and community engagement), Murali Srinivasan (District 3, the city's first Indian American Councilmember, won by one vote then a tiebreaker), and Richard Mehlinger (District 5, the city's first openly queer male Councilmember, prioritizing innovation, affordable living, reduced car dependency, and climate action, and stressing the Council should work for the whole city rather than by "district prerogative").
  • netfile.com (opens in a new tab)City of Sunnyvale's own NetFile-hosted public campaign-finance portal (aid=COS, discovered via the portal's own agency-directory API, api/public/sites/api/Agency/SUNN, after the human-facing guess "SUNN" turned up an empty, unrelated agency code). Its JSON roster API, api/public/sites/api/QuickNameSearch, returns the agency's full candidate and committee history regardless of the query string passed to it -- an apparent bug in this deployment, worked around by reading the full roster rather than filtering it. That roster names exactly three 2026-dated council committees -- "Linda Sell for Sunnyvale City Council District 1 2026," "Murali Srinivasan for Sunnyvale City Council 2026," and "Richard Mehlinger for City Council 2026" -- and no other 2026 committee for any Sunnyvale office. The portal's filing-index API, api/filings/byFiler, returned Sell's complete 2026 filing history (a Form 501 dated 2026-03-02; Form 410 filings dated 2026-02-24, 2026-02-27, 2026-03-13, an amendment dated 2026-03-16, 2026-08-17, and 2026-08-28; Form 497 late-contribution reports dated 2026-03-16 and 2026-05-01; and one FPPC Form 460 covering Jan. 1-June 30, 2026, filed 2026-07-30) on the first attempt, but the identical query against Srinivasan's and Mehlinger's committee IDs returned HTTP 400 in every attempt, and the portal's document-download endpoint returned only 400 or 404 responses under roughly a dozen different URL patterns tried for all three committees -- so no dollar figures from any of the three committees' actual filings could be read in this pass.

Last updated August 31, 2026.