King County Elections released an update to the elections tally late this afternoon. But it’s clear that most of their day-2 efforts have been on sorting and verifying ballots, rather than counting them: they logged an additional 60,000 Seattle votes received since 6pm last night, but only counted about 13,000 of them.
Not surprisingly, this afternoon’s City Council race results are not terribly different than last night’s. But with another 87,500 ballots ready to count and more trickling in through the mail, we’re likely to see much more substantial changes over the next two days.
Most interesting so far has been the ballot return rate (ballots returned as a percentage of registered voters): five of the seven races (all except Districts 2 and 6) have already surpassed their final return rates for the 2015 general election. City-wide the return rate is 47.7%; Districts 1 and 3 have both cracked the 50% mark.
- District 1: 51.1%
- District 2: 43.1%
- District 3: 51.1%
- District 4: 47.4%
- District 5: 47.1%
- District 6: 48.8%
- District 7: 44.6%
Four years ago, District 3 had the highest return rate at 50.8%, while District 2 had the lowest at 40.3%.
Here’s how things now stand in the races:
- District 1: Herbold 51.7%, Tavel 48.0%
- District 2: Morales 55.8%, Solomon 43.7%
- District 3: Orion 53.8%, Sawant 45.8%
- District 4: Pedersen 57.4%, Scott 42.2%
- District 5: Juarez 57.6%, Sattler 42.0%
- District 6: Strauss 52.6%, Wills 46.9%
- District 7: Lewis 49.7%, Pugel 49.8%
In District 7, Andrew Lewis and Jim Pugel are now a mere 20 votes apart.
The next update is tomorrow at 4pm.
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