Salomon continues to widen lead over McClelland

By Evan Smith

Shoreline City Council candidate Jesse Salomon continued to widen his lead over opponent Robin McClelland in votes counted Friday.

Salomon’s lead reached 77 votes Friday, taking him out of the range for a mandatory recount.

State law requires a machine recount if two candidates are within 0.5 percent of their combined number of votes and a hand recount if they are within 0.25 percent of the two-candidate total.

With Salomon having 7,356 votes to 7,279 for McClelland, their total of 14,635 votes means that a margin of 73 votes or fewer would trigger a machine recount and a margin of 37 votes or fewer would trigger a hand recount.

Of the 17,717 ballots counted from Shoreline, 3,032 left the position blank, and 50 had write-in votes.

The votes were part of a King County voter turnout of 50.90 percent, compared to an expected final turnout of about 52 percent. Officials had counted almost 98 percent of the expected final number of ballots through Friday.

Turnout in the City of Shoreline had reached 53.0 percent through Friday.

County elections officials had 8,000 uncounted ballots on hand at the end of the Friday business day.