UPDATE: (2:46PM, Thursday) King County Elections had to evacuate their office yesterday due to a suspicious powder they received in the mail, and it put them behind in tallying votes. This morning they recorded a large number of additional votes that they have received but not tallied yet – the existence of which was not reflected in their press releases yesterday. That makes some of the data, and the conclusions I draw below, less accurate. Rather than post a mid-day update with partial data (which won’t provide a good apples-to-apples comparison), I’m going to update this tonight with consistent, accurate and complete data with the end-of-day numbers from King County Elections on both ballots received and the vote counts for each candidate. Stay tuned.
What happened? Voter apathy. The ballot returns are barely above the levels of the August primary, and well below the numbers for two years ago. Here’s a good summary chart tracking the day-by-day returns, compared with previous elections (“ED” stands for “Election Day”):
When looking at the age breakdown of voters, it also suggests that this was a repeat of the August primary. The same people stayed home.
That’s more bad news for Tammy Morales. On Election Day in August, she had 48% of the vote. In the following days she picked up four points and finished at 52%. This time she’s at 45.3% on Election Day (45.5% Wednesday) and four points won’t push her over the top. Of note: so far both Strauss and Morales have fewer votes in this election (and a lower percentage of total votes) than they did at the same point in time in the primary when they were competing with a wider field of candidates; not only did they not consolidate votes from candidates that were eliminated, but they lost some of their base. And apparently neither managed to motivate more voters to turn in their ballots.
Two last (but very interesting) charts: first, comparing the number of ballots returned by Council district. D6 has a very engaged voter base. D7 and D2, not so much.
That chart is a bit unfair, because while the seven districts have approximately the same population, they have vastly different numbers of registered voters:
| D1 reg voters: | 74,574 |
| D2 reg voters: | 65,990 |
| D3 reg voters: | 73,945 |
| D4 reg voters: | 60,600 |
| D5 reg voters: | 69,549 |
| D6 reg voters: | 77,438 |
| D7 reg voters: | 58,884 |
What is perhaps more meaningful to look at the number of ballots cast as a percentage of registered voters:
D6 has a lot of voters and they vote in (relatively) high numbers. D4 has much fewer voters, but high turnout. D2 has incredibly low turnout.
Unless there are some dramatic surprises in the uncounted ballots (or King County doesn’t get a good chunk of ballots counted tomorrow), six of the seven should be conclusive by tonight (D2 is likely going to be very close).
Thank you for bringing up District 4, which includes much of the U. District and Lake City. Four has a high voter turnout …. but most news outlets don’t bother with it, except The Stranger. (One reason I can’t help but retain some respect for “Seattle’s Only Newspaper” — Stranger’s slogan, not mine.) The problems in Four are many–a rising crime rate, including violent crime, homeless encampments–but an uninformed population is not one of them. There was a hotly contested match-up between progressive tech guy, the enormously likable Ron Davis and the more pragmatic Maritza Rivera, who was unfairly branded as ridiculous pro-cop by The Stranger. She’s winning.
“enormously likable” is definately a matter of taste. I found him to be an empty suit, flip flopping position based on his audence at the time. And following his twitter feed showed a whiny, self-absorbed guy who actually dragged his own kids into the campaign narrative in a negative campaigning way “Rivera supporters kids are bullying my children”.
Do you recognize irony?
Ah, my bad.
It wasn’t clear — MY bad, A.
I had no idea that it was meant ironicly.
How was the age data obtained?
The age data is posted by King County Elections — all public information. https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/depts/elections/results/ballot-return-statistics/2023/202311.aspx
The low turnout in District 2 is really disappointing.