Mike McGinn padded his margin by an additional 694 votes this afternoon, more than doubling his narrow lead over Joe Mallahan to 1209 votes:
| Mike McGinn | 75,657 | 49.99% |
| Joe Mallahan | 74,448 | 49.19% |
This represents McGinn’s largest numerical lead thus far, and while not conclusive, bodes well for those anticipating a trend toward McGinn amongst late voters.
In this latest drop, King County Elections added 21,691 Seattle ballots to the total, of which McGinn won 51.7% of the vote… his best performance in any of the batches thus far. KCE will drop a smaller batch of ballots later tonight, and that will give us a better idea of whether a McGinn trend is revealing itself.
Regardless, these new numbers don’t look good for Mallahan. McGinn’s margin of victory is now outside the 0.5% range that would trigger an automatic recount, and as the number of ballots outstanding diminishes, so do the odds of a Mallahan comeback. If the turnout projections hold true, Mallahan would have to win about 51.2% of the remaining ballots. This is certainly doable — Mallahan won 51.1% of the Wednesday afternoon drop, his best showing thus far — I just don’t know of any solid reason to suggest a late Mallahan surge.
UPDATE:
And in the county executive race, Dow Constantine continues to expand his lead over Susan Hutchison, who now trails by a nearly 17-point margin. That’s worse than David Irons.
If my Rabbit Math is any good, McGinn’s lead has widened to 1,209 votes. Looks like Goldy was right — the late count is trending away from Mallahan.
Re update: But Suzie still leads cigaret smoke, which is encouraging her to believe she can lose a Senate race, too!
I thought it might trend this way because Mallahan’s base of business types probably got their ballots in long ago while the more slacker types just got it together in time.
If anyone stumbles upon Kathi Lambert floating in the shitter at a truck stop out Highway 2, please give ‘er a courtesy flush, her stench is starting to drift across the lake. Kind of an angus bacon burger with notes of methane and low tide.
Late ballot drop is out, very good news for McGinn.
His lead almost doubled, to 2384, and his percentage lead is 1.4%. McGinn took over 53% of this batch.
I’m reminded of the signature counts for r-71 that we were assuming would be dropped randomly, but in fact they weren’t, which led to some early and inaccurate predictions. Does the state count the ballots like they counted the signatures for getting r-71 on the ballot?
Brian,
This isn’t the state, it’s the county.
@7 Ah, didn’t know that. The main point of the Question from #6 still applies, though, doesn’t it: are these drops random or not?