Voters in a Los Angeles-area state Senate district appear to have forcefully rejected Democrat Tony Mendoza’s bid to return to the Senate office from which he resigned in February amid a sexual-harassment scandal.

But that’s about all that seems clear about the results in Senate District 32.

Tuesday’s ballot booklet contained two separate primaries for the 32nd, one for a special election to fill the final months of Mendoza’s term and the other for the election of a representative for the next four-year term. But by late Wednesday, even with many votes still uncounted, the numbers strongly indicated that the two contests produced different results despite having all of the same leading contenders.

Rita Topalian, an attorney and one of two Republicans on the ballot, finished first in both races, getting 25.3 percent in the special election and 24.6 in the regular primary.

In the special election, Democrat Vanessa Delgado, the Montebello mayor, finished second with 16.3 percent, ahead of Mendoza with 14.3 percent and Democrat Bob Archuleta, a Pico Rivera city councilman, with 11.9 percent.

But in the regular primary, Archuleta finished second, with 17.8 percent, while Delgado was third at 15.6 percent and Mendoza fourth, at 10 percent.

“This has always been one of the stranger races on the ballot, but the result is even stranger,” Delgado said Wednesday, adding that she’s “perplexed” that voters chose different candidates in largely identical races.

One explanation she’d considered, Delgado said, was that the candidates names appeared in different orders in the two ballots. Archuleta did much better in the race in which he was listed first. In the other, Delgado and Archuleta both were listed near the middle of the pack.

Archuleta and Mendoza did not respond to requests for interviews Wednesday. Likewise, L.A. County election officials did not respond to requests for an interview about whether any vote-counting irregularities might explain the different results. Some 118,552 names were left off voting rosters in parts of Los Angeles County on Tuesday.

Overall, ballots from continue to be counted, and the county is scheduled to release an updated tally Friday.

Mendoza resigned Feb. 22 from his office representing the district that includes Artesia, Montebello, Whittier, Pico Rivera, Downey and Norwalk, stepping down as Senate colleagues prepared to vote on whether to expel him after an investigation found that the married father of four had engaged in “a pattern of unwelcome flirtation and sexually suggestive behavior” toward female colleagues and staffers as young as 19.

But Mendoza, who denied the allegations, announced on Feb. 23 that he would run to win back the seat. His fundraising lagged, however, and his failure to break into the top two Tuesday wasn’t a surprise.

If the results don’t change after further vote-counting, Topalian and Delgado will meet in an Aug. 7 special-election runoff to determine who serves the rest of the Mendoza term that ends in December. And Topalian and Archuleta will meet Nov. 6 in the general election for the next four-year term.