For what it’s worth, there was a similar reversal for Harrell in 2021. But it was slight — 2.5 points — and then reversed again.

So, Wilson seems like she is in a great position to win. Harrell needs a big shift in fortunes. But is that totally out of the question?

The other challenge for Harrell: The very last votes seem to trend further left. I suspect that’s mostly due to the demographics of people who need to resolve signature challenges.

We can see right now that many of the challenged ballots are from young voters.

The current election has about 8,000 ballots remaining.

In 2017, the reversal meant Durkan went from losing ballot drops by ~3.5 percentage points to gaining by ~2.5 — a swing of 6.

Harrell needs a larger reversal than that. He’s losing batches by 11.4 percentage points now.

Many of the ballots that have been held up due to signature issues are from young voters. So getting those resolved could give her a further boost.

Based on the ballot-processing data, there appears to be 8,120 votes ballots left to count for the city.

But of those, there are signature challenges on 1,703 of them. This race could be decided on which voters get their signature problems resolved.

Here is the chart of the changing vote tallies so far. As expected from last week, Wilson needed to gain about 55% of the late votes to surpass Harrell. She got 55.6% of those tallied today.

Good question. They only remove the ballot from the envelope after the signature has completed verification.

For all the people desperate for a final answer on this race, I'm sorry to report that the county doesn't plan any more tabulation updates until Monday afternoon.

Given how close this election is getting, it could come down to how many people resolve signature challenges on their ballots. The county says there are 2,053 signature challenges for Seattle ballots.

UPDATE: The elections department says they counted more than expected today, so there are now only an estimated 45,000 votes left to count for the mayor's race.

As a result, Wilson needs to maintain that ~55% level to catch up.

Updated chart:

Here is a look at how the 2021 count unfolded.

Harrell's daily proportions for the first five drops went 65%, 62%, 54%, 49%, then 50%. This time he has gone from 53%, then 57%, now 48%.

I kept it so you can see how many votes have been counted and roughly how many more there are to count!

I also checked the daily counts on the 2017 race: Jenny Durkan also started losing ground on day 2, so Harrell's numbers today are noteworthy compared to the past two elections.

Later ballots in Seattle generally swing left, shifting the margins of some races by more than double digits.

I just went back to look at the 2021 race. Harrell started losing ground on day 2. This time, he gained, so it's possible his numbers could be more resilient this time.

The plan is a results update every day at 4:30 p.m., but not on the weekends. Lots of votes left to count, so I don't expect we will know the winner until next week.

Seattle is being closely watched as an echo of the Mamdani race in New York. Here’s the NYT preview of the Seattle matchup:

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/u...

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Here is an example of how much each ballot count can differ from early returns. In 2019, Kshama Sawant was losing by about 9 percentage points but then was winning later ballots by about 20 percentage points.

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