In Case You Missed It: Last Night's Elections

If, for some reason, you decided to spend your Tuesday doing something other than anxiously awaiting the results of an election that probably fewer than 1 in 4 King County Residents even voted in, we forgive you. Not everyone enjoys watching a live stream of empty chairs, or election parties where almost no one shows up, even though the candidate is likely to move ahead to the November ballot.

But we do enjoy all of those things--even the boring election parties--and we wanted to make sure that, just in case you were curious, we kept you looped on what's happening in your County.

Last night, at 8:15, the County's Elections Office dropped the first round of results. That round, which counted all of the ballots received and counting prior to election day, isn't the final outcome--but it's all the information we're going to get until 4:30 this afternoon, when more official tallies are supposed to be completed and made public. But even then, it's technically not final. Not today, not tomorrow--not for another week and change.

Yes, thanks to vote by mail, we don't have actual, real, final results until August 31.

Seriously.

But long before that, hopefuls will give up hope, concessions will be made, and those who were elected to move forward will campaign.

So let's chat about that a bit.

As of right now, it looks like this:

• Bobby Forch and Jean Godden will move forward in the race for City Council Position 1, despite aggressive campaigning (and fundraising) by challenger Maurice Classen. Godden managed to pull in an impressive number of votes--we're fairly sure it was due to her mention of sexting at Campaign Survivor.
• Fathie Karshi, who barely raised any money and did no campaigning and basically unofficially dropped out garnered just under 5% of the vote, so Dian Ferguson and Sally Clark (who scored a whopping 71.4% of the vote) will go head-to-head for Position 9.
• Incumbent Jane Hague eked ahead with a slight lead to retain her place in the race for her seat on the County Council. Her challenger will most likely be Richard E. Mitchell, though the race for second place is a tight one.
• Joe McDermott, however, raked in over 67% of the vote for his seat on the Council. The next closest challenger is Diana Toledo, with Goodspaceguy Nelson etching out an impressive 1094 votes.
• The tunnel will likely move forward, which is good-ish, since City officials have already started working on it, and contractors have already been promised work for it, albeit semi-illegally.
• Incumbent Peter Maier and Sharon Peaslee will contend for the School Board's District 1 position.
• Sherry Carr and Kate Martin will continue campaigning for District 2.
• The Seattle Times actually got one right in the District 3 race, with their 2 favorites, incumbent Harium Martin-Morris and TOPS mom Michelle Buetow moving forward.
• Meanwhile, in District 6, retired teacher Marty McLaren will face off with current board president Steve Sundquist, which is likely to get interesting.

We'll let you know if anything changes, though with the volume of votes already received, there's not much of a chance that many of these races will see any last-minute pushes. But this is politics, after all, and one can never tell.