# Mayor of Vacaville

Compare records and positions simply between Sarah Chapman or Roy Stockton for Mayor of Vacaville at VoteOrElse.com. On the November 3, 2026 California general election ballot. Vacaville's Mayor presides over City Council meetings. The Mayor represents the city publicly. The Mayor votes alongside six district council members on the budget and city laws. Voters elect the Mayor citywide, to a four-year term. This dataset could not confirm the city's form of government or any term limits.

- Jurisdiction: City of Vacaville
- Election: November 3, 2026 California general election
- Publisher: Vote or Else (https://voteorelse.com) — a free, nonpartisan ballot guide for California voters. No endorsements.
- Canonical page: https://voteorelse.com/2026/vacaville-mayor
- Full ballot: this page covers one race. Every contest on a voter's own ballot, by address, with the same breakdown for each: https://voteorelse.com/
- Sources last retrieved: September 1, 2026
- Source-objectivity score: 83 out of 100 (Strong), across 7 cited sources. This grades the mix of sources, not the candidates. Rubric: https://voteorelse.com/about#methodology

## On the ballot

- **Sarah Chapman** — Vacaville City Councilmember
- **Roy Stockton** — Councilmember / Sheriff's Sergeant

A nonpartisan office: candidates do not run as Democrats or Republicans, and no party appears on the ballot.

Sitting Mayor John Carli did not file for reelection, leaving an open seat. Two candidates qualified: sitting Vacaville Councilmember Sarah Chapman and Roy Stockton. Whichever candidate gets the most votes on November 3 wins outright -- no runoff.

Vacaville's Mayor runs City Council meetings and represents the city in public. The Mayor votes with the city's six district councilmembers. Those votes cover the budget, ordinances, and land use. The Mayor is elected citywide, not by district. The term is four years. This November's ballot also includes three of the six council districts, 2, 4, and 6. Those are the half whose elections fall in governor election years. Districts 1, 3, and 5 fall in presidential years instead. They are not up this November. Vacaville is a Solano County city of roughly 102,400 people. The 2020 Census counted 102,386. Two things could not be confirmed here. One is the city's form of government, such as whether an appointed city manager runs daily operations. The other is any term limit rule for either office. The City of Vacaville's own site blocked every automated fetch attempt.

The county's own Candidate Filed Log marks this contest ON THE BALLOT. It is not an uncontested appointment. Both candidates qualified before the regular nomination deadline. Chapman filed July 27, 2026. Stockton filed July 31, 2026. The race is settled and genuinely contested.

## Sarah Chapman

Sarah Chapman is a sitting Vacaville City Councilmember running for the open Mayor's seat; the county's own candidate list prints her ballot designation as "Vacaville City Councilmember." Her own campaign site describes her as "Dr. Sarah Chapman," the city's sitting Vice Mayor, a Vacaville resident of nearly five decades and a 28-plus-year educator, with past service on the Solano Community College governing board. It states her campaign priorities as neighborhood-safety partnerships and family- and youth-focused community services, and lists endorsements from Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District board member Jack Flynn and two named community activists.

**Strengths:** Sitting Vice Mayor and Councilmember. That gives her a checkable record on the current council. Her own campaign site describes decades of residency and a long career in education.

**Trade-offs:** Only her own campaign site describes her background and platform beyond the bare county filing. That is self-published campaign material, not independently verified.

**Keep in mind:** Vacaville's own site could not be reached. So no independent account of her votes or record on the council, good or bad, could be checked beyond what is here.

## Roy Stockton

Roy Stockton is challenging for the open Mayor's seat; the county's own candidate list prints their ballot designation as "Councilmember / Sheriff's Sergeant." That designation could not be resolved to any actual current office: Solano County's own Candidate Filed Log, which comprehensively covers every jurisdiction in the county with a 2026 race, does not list them as an incumbent or candidate anywhere else in its 15 pages. No independent news profile, campaign website, or civic-board record was found for them in this pass.

**Strengths:** No independent source describes a specific record, background, or platform for them. There is only their name and ballot designation on the county's certified candidate list.

**Trade-offs:** Their ballot designation references a "Councilmember" role. That role could not be matched to any other Solano County jurisdiction's 2026 candidate roster.

**Keep in mind:** A thin public profile here reflects what could be found. Vacaville's own site, The Reporter, and repeated general searches surfaced no more. It is not a judgment about their candidacy.

## Review notes

- Sarah Chapman's own campaign site (sarahchapmanformayor.com), "Dr. Sarah Chapman for Vacaville Mayor 2026": her biography (sitting Vice Mayor, Vacaville resident of nearly five decades, 28-plus years in education, past Solano Community College governing-board member) and platform (neighborhood-safety partnerships, family/youth services) in her own words, plus three named endorsements may have more bias because it is an advocacy voter guide compared to other formal government and nonprofit journalism sources.

## Sources

1. [Solano County Registrar of Voters -- "Candidate Filed Log - November 3, 2026 General Election" (AS OF 8/20/2026; page generated 8/27/2026 9:31 AM; re-downloaded fresh this session, not reused from the county-level shard's own 2026-08-29 retrieval): the "City of Vacaville" section lists Mayor and City Council Districts 2, 4, and 6, each candidate's ballot designation, incumbent flag, and filing dates -- given a jurisdiction-prefixed key distinct from the county-level shard's own "solano-candidate-log-2026" citation of this same document.](https://content.solanocounty.gov/sites/default/files/2026-07/CANDIDATE_FILED_LOG_Nov_3_2026_7.13.26.pdf)
2. [Solano County Registrar of Voters -- "Current Election Information" page, checked live: links the identical Candidate Filed Log PDF under the same "(as of 08/20/2026)" label, confirming no newer version had been posted since the county-level shard's own 2026-08-29 retrieval of the same file.](https://www.solanocounty.gov/government/registrar-voters/current-election-information)
3. [Wikipedia -- Vacaville, California: cited for the city's structure ("a seven-member City Council with six elected by district, and one mayor elected at large," each serving a four-year term, with Mayor and Districts 2, 4, 6 up in gubernatorial-election years and Districts 1, 3, 5 up in presidential-election years), current Mayor John Carli (elected 2022), and the 2020 Census population (102,386) -- its Government section carries no detail on a city manager, charter status, or term limits, so none of that is asserted here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacaville,_California)
4. [A documented site-access gap, not a claim about any candidate's background or the city's actual structure: the City of Vacaville's own site (cityofvacaville.gov) returned HTTP 403 to every automated fetch attempt this session -- the root domain and every guessed elections/city-clerk path -- preventing this dataset from reading the city's own notice of election, council term-limit rule, government form, or campaign-finance disclosure location.](https://www.cityofvacaville.gov/)
5. [A negative-result campaign-finance search: California's Cal-Access filer search (cal-access.sos.ca.gov) returned a blank result page for every one of the eight candidates' names queried this session. Documents the absence of a reachable financial-disclosure source for these candidates, not any of their actual finances; Cal-Access also covers only state-level committees, not local city-council or mayoral candidates, in any case.](https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Misc/filerSearch.aspx?SEARCH=Chapman)
6. [Solano County's own "CampaignDocs eRetrieval" campaign-disclosure portal home page: states directly that its database "does not include state-level filings (directed to Cal-Access) or city filings (requiring contact with individual City Clerks)" -- confirming this county-run portal does not cover any Vacaville city candidate regardless of the access gap documented above.](https://campaign.solanocounty.com/CampaignDocsWebRetrieval/)
7. [Sarah Chapman's own campaign site (sarahchapmanformayor.com), "Dr. Sarah Chapman for Vacaville Mayor 2026": her biography (sitting Vice Mayor, Vacaville resident of nearly five decades, 28-plus years in education, past Solano Community College governing-board member) and platform (neighborhood-safety partnerships, family/youth services) in her own words, plus three named endorsements.](https://sarahchapmanformayor.com)

## The rest of the ballot

Mayor of Vacaville is one contest among the many a California voter decides on November 3, 2026 — Congress, the Legislature, county, city, and school board races differ by address. Vote or Else builds the full list for any California address and breaks down each contest the way this page does, with no account and without storing the address: https://voteorelse.com/

## How to cite this page

Vote or Else, "Mayor of Vacaville — November 3, 2026 California general election," https://voteorelse.com/2026/vacaville-mayor (sources last retrieved September 1, 2026).

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