King County Elections just dropped the results from about 54,000 newly tallied ballots, about half the number we were expecting to be reported today. No word yet on what’s taking so long.
In the King County Executive race, Dow Constantine now leads Susan Hutchison, 57.53% to 42.26%, a full one point increase in his margin of victory from last night’s results.
In the Seattle mayoral race, Mike McGinn’s lead over Joe Mallahan has narrowed to 461 votes, or a 49.77% to 49.33% margin. McGinn led by 910 votes last night, 50.03% to 48.96%. 20,742 new Seattle ballots were added to the mix, of which Mallahan received about 51% of the vote.
So what does this mean?
Not all that much. Like I’ve previously said, my understanding is that these ballots were from the same larger batch from which yesterday’s ballots were drawn: those that were received by 5PM Friday. If voters trended McGinn over the weekend, that trend won’t show up until later ballot drops. And there’s certainly no conservative trend in today’s new numbers in the county executive race.
Still, if I were Mallahan, I’d be feeling a tad buoyed. Whereas if I were Hutchison, I would do the gracious thing and finally concede.
UPDATE:
Drawing on my earlier post about the miracle it would take for Hutchison to pull out victory, assuming turnout projections are fairly on target, Hutchison would need to win the remaining ballots by a better than 15-point margin in order to pull into the lead; she currently trails by a better than 15-point margin.
She better start praying.