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There was nothing odd, wrong, or suspicious about Seattle’s election results. They sure felt slow, but they weren’t.
Someone tell that to outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell and Seattle Police Officer’s Guild President Mike Solan. They seem misinformed.
Yesterday, at his concession speech, the always-extemporaneous Harrell offered some off-hand election misinformation.
“A lot of people were saying that I shouldn’t concede and that there were anomalies, differences, and stuff,” Harrell said, before skating past that and lauding himself for conceding anyway.
Halei Watkins from King County Elections said she didn’t know what Harrell was referring to. “There’s been nothing amiss on our end,” she wrote in an email. “Happy to chase something down if there are specifics or more information.”
Neither the Harrell campaign nor the mayor’s office responded to The Stranger’s requests for comment about Harrell’s claims that there were “anomalies,” so Watkins had nothing to chase down.
In a statement Friday, Seattle Police Officer Guild President Solan suggested that the election process, which was no different from previous elections, needed reform.
“The vote count for Seattle’s next mayor took so long that I almost forgot we had an election. And much like public safety in Seattle, our election process needs to be reformed. SPOG members also want to thank Mayor Harrell for his efforts to build back SPD. We look forward to continuing his legacy with Mayor-Elect Wilson.”
SPOG did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment.
According to King County Elections, nothing was different from this election compared to other odd-year elections. Typically, people vote earlier and more consistently during even-year elections when there are national races on the ballot. Odd-year elections inspire more last-minute voting, Watkins says. The slower feeling this election had to do with a more than 30 percent uptick in voter turnout in the last day of the election, with most of those people opting to use ballot boxes.
“I went back and looked at posting numbers from 2023 and 2021 and we are right in line with our pace from those years,” Watkins said last week.
Ben Anderstone, a political consultant who worked on Sara Nelson’s campaign, writes in a text message to The Stranger that there’s “absolutely nothing suspicious here.”
“We had slightly higher turnout than expected, and King County took the normal amount of time to count—in pace with many other counties. Neither is an ‘anomaly.’ Neither is even particularly weird. Anyone who is worried about fraud can easily go to the Elections website and download a list of every voter who returned a ballot. The voter file is very much public record.”
“I don’t think we should be slinging around claims of election irregularities without meaningful evidence,” he writes.
In the weeks before election day, Harrell signed off on a new SPOG contract that boosted Seattle Police Department starting salaries by 42 percent to almost $120,000, according to a report by Publicola.
While Wilson is in favor of hiring more cops, she was critical of Harrell’s handling of the SPOG contract, saying he should have negotiated more accountability measures and more alternative response capacity like the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team. Historically, SPOG has resisted expanding the CARE team, but in the new contract, SPOG acquiesced to a twofold increase in CARE team members and more direct power for those responders. Wilson has also nodded toward decreasing the power of SPOG.
Sowing seeds of doubt in a fair election is a playbook we know well. “Losing candidates who cast unfounded suspicion on election results have unfortunately become far too normalized over the past five years,” Kate Bitz, a senior organizer at the Western States Center, a pro-Democracy nonprofit, tells The Stranger.
Bitz points out that Solan has a history of playing into right-wing misinformation. In 2021, he blamed the January 6 insurrection—which was about a “stolen election”—on the “far right and far left.” Solan and SPOG also inhibited investigations into SPD officers who attended the insurrection, trying to protect them from “cancel culture.” Bitz called those actions “especially reckless… evidence-free musings.”
Comments like this “[diminish] civic trust,” and have “negative effects on voter participation, and even threats and political violence.”
Above all, Bitz believes these comments from Harrell and Solan undermine the will of the people.
“Seattle voters deserve better than to have their choice disrespected like this,” Bitz says. “The King County Elections Office also deserves better than insinuations from public servants undermining their hard work to provide a secure, reliable process.”
News editor Vivian McCall contributed reporting.
