Kshama Sawant holds slim lead as more Seattle City Council recall ballots are counted

A ballot measure to recall Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant remained undecided Tuesday, a week after the election, with votes to retain Sawant maintaining a slight lead as mail-in ballots trickled in and challenged votes were cleared.

On the sixth day of ballot counting, King County Elections reported that those in favor of Sawant finishing her term, set to end in 2023, were leading with 50.4% of the vote, a difference of just 309 votes.

That’s the same gap as Monday. The 30 new votes counted Tuesday were split evenly between the two sides.

Sawant took the lead over the recall on Thursday and has maintained a 50.3-50.4% edge since, as the last few dozen votes arrived by the mail and hundreds of challenged ballots were resolved.

With nearly 41,000 ballots counted, the slow rate of late-counted ballots is nominal. But with more than 400 challenged ballots remaining to be potentially resolved and counted before Thursday’s 4:30 p.m. deadline, the results are not finalized.

Voters can check the status of their ballots here.

While there are no automatic recounts in a recall election, either campaign could request and pay for a recount between Dec. 17-21.