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54% of votes counted this far - Election results as of 4:30PM Nov 5th, 2025
By Josh Rosenau
As a candidate in what is—for the moment—the tightest race in King County, I wanted to share some notes on how to interpret results as the county elections department posts numbers. The key takeaway is that we won't have anything resembling final results until the weekend, or maybe even later, and that we should all take the early results with a grain of salt.
King County Elections has a great explanation of their process for counting returned ballot envelopes, verifying signatures, validating ballots, and then tabulating results. You can even watch livestreams of the process!
As they process envelopes, the county updates the turnout rate and total ballot count here. On Election Day, the turnout stood around 38%; that's quite low by historic standards. Wednesday, turnout in LFP was reported closer to 48%, in line with the off-year city council election in 2023.
Thursday morning, they updated the number to 54%, making this a high turnout election. And that means there are still thousands of ballots remaining to count, about 40% of those cast!
In the race for Position 3, incumbent Jon Lebo is ahead of me by just 14 votes. Semra Riddle leads Bryce James by nearly 100 votes in the race for Position 1, and Proposition 1, the levy lid lift, is less than 70 votes away from passing. All of those are well within the margin that races can — and often do — shift over the first week of ballot counting.
Because the elections department typically works in the order ballots were received, there are patterns to how the vote counts move. For various reasons, older, wealthier, whiter, and more conservative voters tend to vote early, and the more progressive vote tends to come in late. That means that the final results in past races have shifted by as much as 12 points from the first results to the final outcome, typically to the advantage of tax measures and more progressive candidates.
Knowing all that doesn't make the waiting any easier, but it has helped keep me from obsessively reloading the county results page. If Prop 1 has a late surge and passes, or results in my race flip, it's just because of the careful and dedicated work of the county elections officials, who take the time to make sure the results are accurate.
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Josh Rosenau
Josh for LFP • http://joshforlfp.com • 425-405-5536
Endorsed by: 1st District Dems, King County Dems, King County Young Dems, Shoreline Firefighters IAFF 1760
