By Erica C. Barnett
In the latest batch of ballots counted by King County’s elections office, labor organizer Katie Wilson pulled ahead of incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell by 91 votes—a little over 55.6 percent of the 38,000 votes counted on Monday, with about 6,400 ballots outstanding.
While supporters cheered Wilson on social media as the latest results trended in her favor, she hasn’t won the election yet. If the margin between two candidates is less than one half of one percent, and less than 2,000 votes (which it currently is), that triggers a hand recount of all the ballots. If it’s outside either of those margins, the ballots still have to go through a machine recount, a process that can take days.
Recounts don’t generally change the outcome of elections, but it isn’t impossible: In 2004, Democrat Christine Gregoire became governor after a hand recount added about 400 votes to her total, bringing her 129 votes ahead of Republican Dino Rossi. That margin represented a much smaller percentage of the 2.9 million votes cast statewide than Wilson’s current 91-vote margin over Harrell, out of about 280,000 votes cast in Seattle.
Closer to home, in 2015, the City Council District 1 results were so close they triggered a recount, but the recount didn’t end up changing a single vote in the race between Shannon Braddock and Lisa Herbold, who won.
Both campaigns are currently working to “cure” the ballots of supporters whose ballots have been challenged, which often happens when someone’s signature doesn’t match the one King County has on file or they forget to sign their ballot. Currently, there are about 1,700 ballots that have been challenged, according to King County Elections, which leaves a lot of potential votes on the table.
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Although the late ballots have come in about 55 percent in Wilson’s favor, the last few batches of ballots to be counted can be hard to predict. (A spokesperson for King County Elections said they’re definitely from ballot boxes on Election Night, but there’s no way to know where in the city they were from.) In addition, King County generally holds some ballots they weren’t able to tabulate during the regular machine count and adds them to the tally at the end; these ballots don’t mirror late ballots, which generally trend toward progressive candidates, because they’re from the entire voting period, which starts weeks before the election.
Still, Wilson supporters have cause to be optimistic; to paraphrases Bruce Harrell on election night, they’d rather be where they are than where he is. “We’re elated to see the results of the recent drop!” Wilson’s campaign manager said after the results came out. “Our volunteers will be working to make sure that every single ballot is counted over the next few days. We believe that those cured ballots will be critical.”
Voters whose ballots are being challenged (check here if you don’t know) have until November 24 to fix any issues and have their vote counted. According to the King County Elections spokesperson, “the bulk of [the ballots] left should be in tomorrow,” so we’ll know more by around 4:00 tomorrow. Tuesday afternoon around 4pm.
