The second ballot drop in the Seattle elections happens today at 4:30. Of a total 136,424 ballots that King County has “processed” (but not counted) since voting started, the county had counted around 89,132 as of last night, leaving 44,918 left to count today. Given Mike McGinn’s current 910-vote lead in the mayor’s race (50.03 to 48.96 percent), that means that Joe Mallahan will have to get just over 51 percent of the votes being counted today to take the lead away from his rival.
McGinn, in contrast, only needs to get around 49 percent of the vote to stay ahead of Mallahan. That wouldn’t be a huge reversal, but if the outstanding late-voter ballots trend toward McGinn (as they did in the primary, and as I think they’re likely to do now—McGinn’s last-minute GOTV effort is already legendary), it does mean McGinn has the upper hand.
Wild card, though: If turnout does end up at 56 percent, as King County Elections has predicted, that would mean that another 84,000 votes remain outstanding. Bottom line: Barring a huge surge for either candidate today, it’ll be a couple more days—at least—before we know anything conclusive.
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And in the primary McGinn slipped into second place on day 2 before he eventually regained the lead. Today will be interesting, but maybe not more than that.
I’m not sure its good news yet. In the primary he increased his support as the count went on because there was a huge undecided contingent that didn’t break until late. That happened to a much lesser extent in the general.
Late polls had McGinn at best tied and at worst down. I think tonight will give us an idea of if they were picking up a trend away from McGinn in the last few days or if it was just bad polling or noise.
Still a complete tossup at this point.
If the polls are to believed, McGinn had all the late momentum. Which may (or may not) translate into late votes.
In addition, McGinn ally Mike O’Brien did far better in Council #8 than anyone had expected.
@2–you may remember that the primary polls in the mayor’s race were way off in predicting percentages.
@3, not really sure about that. There was the last poll that showed the spread narrowing, but it had some possible issues. We’ll know for sure tonight.
@4 right, because of the massive amount of undecided. Polls are descriptive not predictive.
Do youger or older voters that have decided vote early?
“Polls are descriptive not predictive.”
Exactly, and subject to all sorts of problems at the local level.
I don’t think the polls are useful guidance here.
@7 Local polling has always been problematic. I think there was also a good deal of apathy about these choices, which is going to mess with polls. Sure there were the McGinniacs, but most people seemed to be unimpressed with both. I mean the write-in vote for mayor was 4-5 times that of the City Council races.
Seattle (as expected) is underrepresented in the early count. If turnout projections hold, we’ll see on the order of 120,000 more Seattle ballots.
Giffy, it’s not just the write-in vote that throws a monkeywrench. If we assume that all ballots that weren’t recorded for McGinn, Mallahan, or Write-in were left blank, the percentages for the various city races come to:
Mayor — 4.5% (4051)
City Attorney — 15.9% (14211)
Council #2 — 15.9% (14146)
Council #4 — 15.0% (13383)
Council #6 — 12.4% (11075)
Council #8 — 14.7% (13077)
Will those percentages hold up? It wouldn’t take much of a change in the proportion of blanks to change the mayoral outcome, as the number of blanks is almost 4.5 times the current margin between the candidates.
Speaking of late voters, I just walked by Mallahan’s house on Densmore and his ballot is in the outgoing mail.
@11 Good one!
For completeness, I looked at the percentage of blanks in the 2005 election. There were 194061 ballots cast, a bit over twice the 89132 already tallied votes in this cycle (that was 55.47% turnout, by the way). I was shocked to see how high were the percentages of ballots left blank … far above what we’ve seen thus far in 2009.
The same races had these percentages of blank ballots in 2005:
Mayor — 7.4% (14389) [Nickels over Runte]
City Attorney — 40.1% (77739) [Carr ran unopposed]
Council #2 — 17.4% (33713) [Conlin over Miller]
Council #4 — 16.9% (32819) [Drago over Corr]
Council #6 — 19.4% (37639) [Licata over Bascomb]
Council #8 — 20.1% (39097) [McIver over Pelz]
I recall Council #4 and #8 as highly contentious races, yet…
So, if we assume that the proportion of blanks goes up in future tallies — which makes some sense if you consider that late returns imply some difficulty in making the choices — what does that say about the final outcome?
@13 That is interesting. I would have thought that the number of blanks in this cycle, especially for mayor, would have been higher than in the past. Though Runte was hardly a credible challenger.
It is going to be interesting to see how this all falls out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Mallahan took the lead tonight by a narrow margin before losing it again later. Very similar to what happened in the primary, as @1 writes.
Unlike what @1 writes, this race would get a whole lot more interesting if it tightened up tonight.
KC Elections spokesperson Megan Coppersmith says that even though they’re predicting a 56% voter turnout, ballots were trending closer to 50% as of noon yesterday.
“Polls are descriptive not predictive.”
Exactly, and subject to all sorts of problems at the local level.
I don't think the polls are useful guidance here.