Is Seattle’s mayoral race headed for a recount?
Updated 4:30 p.m. 8/10/17: The race for second place in Seattle's mayoral race is getting tighter.
Updated results from Tuesday afternoon show Cary Moon's lead over Nikkita Oliver shrank to fewer than 1,300 votes.
Few ballots remain to be counted, and they includes those with challenged signatures.
Jenny Durkan still leads overall, although her share has dropped since election night last Tuesday. The current tally:
Durkan: 27.9 percent
Moon: 17.6 percent
Oliver: 16.9 percent
Moon's lead would seem insurmountable, but Oliver is close enough that a mandatory recount is still possible. Under state law, there's a recount if the opponents are separated by less than 2,000 votes and one-half of 1 percent of the total votes.
The difference between Moon and Oliver is 0.7 percent of all votes.
Oliver’s supporters are leading a ballot-chasing effort in which they are identifying people whose ballots were missing a signature or that have questionable signatures for one reason or another.
When they find those ballots, the supporters are asking King County elections to re-count it.
Turnout ticked up to just over 40 percent of registered Seattle voters — that's just above projections.
The top two candidates from the primary will move on to the general election in November.
Nikkita Oliver's campaign is currently reaching out to people who cast a vote that wasn't counted. She has said she won’t concede or endorse another candidate until the results are clear. But she signaled that if Moon moved to the general, she would support her over Durkan.
“I think it’s important to align with the candidate who is going to serve the interests of the most vulnerable in our city,” Oliver said. “Of the two that are currently looking like they’ll move through the primary, Cary is the one to have shown to have the strongest analysis around what that means, and the most willingness to be corrected when she’s wrong.”
—Amy Radil, Gil Aegerter and Isolde Raftery
Correction 8/9/2017: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to ballots being "thrown out." Voters who submit ballots without a signature or with one that does not match the signature on file are contacted.
