With 67.1% of the total ballots counted, the picture is becoming very clear as to who will be on the City Council come January. And in one race, the results just changed substantially.
Here are the results as of 4pm this afternoon:
- District 1: Herbold 53.5%, Tavel 46.1%
- District 2: Morales 58.0%, Solomon 41.5%
- District 3: Orion 51.0%, Sawant 48.6%
- District 4: Pedersen 55.0%, Scott 44.6%
- District 5: Juarez 59.2%, Sattler 40.5%
- District 6: Strauss 53.8%, Wills 45.7%
- District 7: Lewis 50.5%, Pugel 49.0%
At this point, given that the conventional wisdom of a left-shift in late balloting is once again proving to be true, there are five clear winners: Herbold, Morales, Pedersen, Juarez, and Strauss.
As expected, in District 7 Andrew Lewis pulled ahead by a small margin today: 365 votes. As the vast majority of the remaining votes get counted tomorrow, expect that lead to extend a bit more, but it’s still too close to call.
The big news today is in District 3, where Kshama Sawant got a huge boost in today’s batch of votes. She now trails Orion by only 739 votes. According to King County Elections, there are 12,662 remaining votes to be counted (assume that will grow a bit as the last stragglers arrive in the mail). If Sawant nets at least 52.9% of those votes, she will pass Orion. In the batch counted since last night, she got 59.6%. So at this point it looks very likely that Sawant will win.
Other news: the high ballot return rates. Overall in the city, the return rate is 54%. By district:
- District 1: 54.0%
- District 2: 47.6%
- District 3: 58.2%
- District 4: 54.7%
- District 5: 43.2%
- District 6: 58.9%
- District 7: 49.9%
King County Elections plans to release two updates tomorrow, at 4:00pm and 8:00pm.
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