King County Elections will post results on the two school district levies around 8:15 p.m. here.

UPDATE 8:16 p.m.: They both passed handily. Over and out!

How large the school levies' margin of victory will be tonight? Twenty points, forty points? Or will anti-school, anti tax crusaders pull out a crushing defeat?

King County Elections reports that only 24 percent of you have mailed in your ballots on the two school levies. Tsk tsk. Find your ballot in that stack of mail, vote (see below), stamp it, mail it by tomorrow, and then drink a shot of whiskey for the kids.

Don't like our advice? Make up your own mind by reading the voters' guide statements—featuring cogent pro arguments and unconvincing con arguments—on Prop 1 and Prop 2. Don't like the voters' guide? Then read this Slog battle between Schools First (who say vote yes on both levies) and Mellisa Westbrook, an education activist and blogger at Save Seattle Schools, who says you should vote against the building and equipment levy.

And don't forget to vote.

Not everyone agrees with the Stranger Election Control Board's YES endorsement of both school levies in the February 9 election. Mellisa Westbrook, who wrote the voters' guide statement against the school facilities levy, argues that these property-tax subsidies can't solve the school district's problems. So today we're giving her a chance to have her say. But we're also letting the Schools First campaign respond.

Westbrook says you should vote NO on the $270 million facilities levy:

Nearly half of Seattle schools are 50+ years old. Aging schools need more care and yet, the district doesn’t maintain these schools. Taxpayers have generously funded over $700 million dollars worth of new schools. And yet, the district doesn’t take care of that major investment by doing regular maintenance. Garfield High School cost $119 million—the district needs to protect that kind of taxpayer investment. So what’s wrong:

• $500M (half-a-billion dollars) in maintenance backlog with no plan to address it. This is not normal for any school district.

• Prop 1 will make a slight dent in the backlog but it’s like using a fire hose on a forest fire. Sure, you’ll put out a few flames but the fire is still raging.

• Once you vote, there is no accountability for how the money is spent. None.

• Deferred maintenance costs more than basic so fewer schools get the help they need from Prop. 1 and taxpayers get to pay more than they should.

• The preliminary BTA list had 23 schools getting new roofs; that’s now down to 11. The first list also had 7 buildings getting seismic help; now that’s down to 3 buildings.

• This levy also goes to technology upgrades and academics, not just buildings. And, just six buildings will take $62 million out of the $270 million.

Back in 1995, Superintendent John Stanford was worried about the maintenance backlog at $185M. Why isn’t our School Board and Superintendent worried about a $500M backlog in 2010? Why aren’t you?

Voting for Prop 1 enables the district to continue their poor facilities management. It’s a short-term gain for a long-term problem that will have a critical tipping point that will cause a crisis for this district.

If you don’t want better care for school buildings now, then when?

And Schools First fires back, saying you should vote YES on both levies:

There’s a Reason The Stranger Supports Props 1 & 2

We haven’t run into a lot of opposition in the course of the campaign to pass Props 1 & 2, the Seattle Public School Levies, because let’s face it—who doesn’t support public schools? But there is one argument that has been raised and needs to be set straight.

A small faction wants to send a “message” to the District by voting against the school levies. Like most 'Vote No' messages, it isn’t clear what the intent is other than to force the District into rethinking the way it runs our public schools. Unfortunately, the wake-up call they intend for the District would have devastating consequences for our kids and our schools. Not only would EVERY public school in Seattle lose 23% of its funding— money used to keep teachers in the classroom and class sizes down— schools would be robbed of EVERY PENNY used to fund basic health and safety projects. Combined with the expected cuts in education funding coming from Olympia, it’s plain to see why The Stranger called support for these levies a “no brainer.” Our schools (and our kids) need them now more than ever!

So, if you want to send a message when you’re filling out your ballot, vote “Yes!” to renew both Props 1&2. Let Seattle’s 46,000 school kids know you won’t risk their right to a basic education, their health, or their safety.

Please, vote “Yes” to renew both levies and mail in your ballot by February 9.

Hate kids? Share your opinion in comments.

Don't like our advice? Make up your own mind by reading the voters' guide statements—featuring cogent pro arguments and unconvincing con arguments—on Prop 1 and Prop 2.

In the name of pummeling a dead ungulate, the latest results from King County Elections show that Mike McGinn is now beating Joe Mallahan by 6,475 votes—a 3.2 percent lead—up from a 5,714 vote lead yesterday.

Fascinating facts: For comparison, Greg Nickels beat Mark Sidran by only 3,158 votes in 2001. But far fewer voters participated in that election. Only 176,800 Seattle ballots were cast eight years ago, compared with 212,498 this year.

Not that it changes the election's outcome, but the man endorsed by labor unions, business interests, the governor, the Seattle Times—all of the supposed power brokers who run this town, or so we thought—is now being defeated by 5,714 votes. That's a three-percent gap. The latest results on Joe Mallahan's loss are here.

In case you didn't catch it, some of these numbers over here show that approximately 20 percent of all Seattle voters looked at The Stranger's endorsements online—meaning at least every fifth voter in the city looked to the SECB for voting guidance (or possibly in order to vote the opposite ticket, but whatever). This isn't even counting cheat-sheet downloads from the home page or the three issues of the paper-paper around town that had the endorsements; we're no mathologists, but that would add some more people, too.

The entire SECB ticket won. Almost. Voters didn't elect our pick for the Human Calculator, err, County Assessor, the King County Council member for District 9, which stretches from central Bellevue to northern Flagstaff, or a greasy half-empty tub of Crisco for Port Commissioner. But everyone else is headed to office. (Sorry, Crisco, we tried.)

So, we the people, you elected 'em: Now what do you want them to do?

Personally, the SECB would like staggered bar closing times (for safety!), more housing like the 1811 building (for drunks!), and a log flume ride from 15th Avenue and East John Street down Denny Way to the sculpture park (for obvious reasons!).

Not that it matters as much now that the conceding and victory speechifying is over, but today Mike McGinn's lead over Joe Mallahan grew even further.

Yesterday it was 4,939 votes. Today it's 5,335 votes.

A modest proposal: Buy more machines to count the mail-in ballots, hire more elections office workers to feed the machines, and get rid of this annoying phenomenon by which we are all sitting around well after election day waiting for ballots that arrived well before election day to be counted.

No need to make that mail-in deadline earlier.

Just speed up the counting before and after the deadline.

If we did that, then on election night we'd have a good, solid snapshot of where the early and on-time voters fell. After that, the secondary drama—because, really, a lot of this complaining is about mail-in balloting interfering with the media's old dramatic narrative schedule—can be in the (hopefully brief) counting of the late arrivals.

Goldy is slapping around the Seattle Times and SeattlePI columnist Joel Connelly for their calls—made here and here—to change the deadline for mail-in ballots. Instead of being postmarked by election day, the Seattle Times and Connelly want ballots received by election day.

Gee, I wonder why the Seattle Times in particular would want to make this change? We knew by Friday night who won the mayor's race—yesterday's returns were a formality—so we only had to wait three days, and the eventual winner—Mike McGinn—was in the lead the entire time. On election night we knew who won the King County Exec race, we knew who are new city attorney was, we knew who won city council seats, we knew who won seats on the school board, we knew the results on R-71 and I-1033. This election was hardly the clusterfuck of cliffhangers that the Seattle Times would lead us to believe.

What's really going on? Maybe the Seattle Times just doesn't like the choices made by last-minute voters. Late voters tend to be younger and younger voters tend to be more progressive. That's why ballots received after last Tuesday have heavily favored Mike McGinn and Dow Constantine. The Seattle Times endorsed Joe Mallahan and Susan Hutchison.

Now it all makes sense.

Mayor-elect Mike McGinn is spending his victory night the same way he spent many nights of his campaign: at his Southeast Seattle campaign headquarters in a room full of volunteers, surrounded by phones and empty pizza boxes. “It looks like a phone bank night,” McGinn says.

McGinn credits his victory with his now legend staff of volunteers, several of whom he plans to hire as his new mayoral staff. “I would be foolish not to take advantage of some of the talented people who we found during the campaign,” he says. “We will also have to bring people with skills and experience that the campaign staff don’t have. It will be a mix of both.”

He faces challenges, however, establishing relationships with the individuals and institutions that historically have held leverage over the mayor’s office. Many key power brokers in Seattle—such as labor unions, veteran politicos, and the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, whose former chair, Tayloe Washburn, actually joined Mallahan’s campaign—made their opposition to McGinn clear by pledging their allegiance and money to Mallahan. But McGinn seems undaunted by potential friction.

“I know that the folks who supported Mallahan had legitimate concerns about the direction the city would go,” he says, “and we are going to reach out to them, hear their concerns, and involve them in decision making.”

“Campaigns are different than building coalitions for government … when the passion of a campaign ends, there is the opportunity for people who care about the city to work together to solve problems,” says McGinn, extending a veritable olive branch. “The opportunity will bet there for everyone to participate.”

McGinn has already started mapping his transition from a neighborhood activist in Greenwood to the city’s most powerful politician at City Hall. Yesterday morning, he had breakfast with Ron Sims, the former King County Executive—and current Deputy Secretary of HUD in the Obama Administration—to discuss “tips on effective transition and the challenges ahead of us,” McGinn says. They discussed regional government planning, McGinn said, but he wouldn't share the details of their conversation.

Among McGinn's ambitions before taking office is influencing Mayor Greg Nickels's search for a new police chief (a political football in the campaign). McGinn says he wants to look at the selection committee to “see if I have any suggestions for who else might be involved,” he says. “I have an interest getting it started as soon as possible.” McGinn hasn’t named members of his transition team yet, but, he says, “We are talking to poeple who have been involved in campaigns and city government."

Video from his press conference today...

Here's the video:

(Eli Sanders adds: "And who's the 'We' in 'We did it'? Lots of people, of course, but it's hard to see how it could have been done without those McGinn-leaning late voters.")

• Mallahan concedes defeat while campaign spokeswoman Charla Neuman looks at her BlackBerry

In his mayoral campaign offices on Eastlake Avenue East, Joe Mallahan told a roomful of reporters, "I want to begin by congratulating Mike McGinn on his success. Mike and his team ran a very hard-fought campaign. They should be proud. I wish Mike well as our next mayor."

Mallahan, who had more than three times the money as McGinn and major institutional backing, blames his loss on McGinn's message and “his persistence in staying on message in every neighborhood,” Mallahan said. "He was the superior campaigner this time around."

Asked if he would do anything differently, Mallahan said no, adding, "Mike ran a great campaign too and he beat us." The former T-Mobile executive said, "I'm going to go back to work for the phone company.”

"If I have one regret it is that people came to think of me as a businessman when I am a social justice Democrat with business credentials," said Mallahan, whose campaign ads repeatedly cited his tenure at T-Mobile.

After most reporters left the room, campaign manager Charla Neuman said she thinks Mallahan was "branded as a well-to-do businessman." She added that many voters shared an anti-Nickels sentiment and Mallahnan was branded as a Nickels proxy. She also said voters were looking for change, following Obama's presidential election.

Neuman said that McGinn softening his opposition to the tunnel may have also assisted his victory. "At first I thought Merry Christmas to us," Neuman said. "But then after thinking about it I thought, 'Oh, no. This could really work against us.'"

It's all over but the concession speech. King County Elections just posted the results of nearly 21,000 more ballots, which put Mike McGinn in the lead by 4,939 votes—more than two percent.

Mayor

Mike McGinn 96514 50.88%

Joe Mallahan 91575 48.28%

Write-in 1605 0.85%

Both McGinn and Joe Mallahan talk to press at 5:00 p.m. More results from King County Elections are here.

Will he concede? Will he drag this thing out? Either way, Mallahan's camp is surely drafting several possible variations on what he may say today. In case they need any help with that, we've whipped up two possible speeches conveniently written in the tone that has defined Mallahan's campaign since day one. Feel free to use either or both or just jump around between them, Joe.

MALLAHAN DOESN'T CONCEDE
Thank you for taking the time to touch base with me today, Seattle. For the last several fiscal quarters, we have been driving accountability in one of the most win-win campaigns for mayor this city has ever empowered its stakeholders to take Seattle to the next level with, and we have also been driving efficiencies. I have been spitballing with my creatives, and we agree that the most efficient thing we can all do right now to move Seattle forward is to proactively tie up the county elections process in bureaucratic knots, because bureaucratic knots create jobs. Thinking outside the box is one of my staff's core competencies, and even though none of the integrated scenarios the professionals who work on my campaign have ideated so far are synergistic with the vote-flow metrics, I vow to keep impacting you and the city by focusing on the value-added buzz of all the endorsements I got and not actualizing my exit strategy. That is mission critical. Going forward, we are going to keep going forward. At least until we see a paradigm shift in electoral delight. A sea change in the vote totals is always possible in a paperless office where everyone's busy herding cats. We need to welcome the next generation of vote auditors into the county elections process and tell them to hit the ground running and go the extra mile in making sure vote-total deliverables are not a done deal. It has been a great pleasure of mine to break through the clutter of everything else you're hearing today. Africans support my candidacy. Thank you.

For the sake of efficiency (-driving), a concession speech could begin the same way.

MALLAHAN CONCEDES
Thank you for taking the time to touch base with me today, Seattle. For the last several fiscal quarters, we have been driving accountability in one of the most win-win campaigns for mayor this city has ever empowered its stakeholders to take Seattle to the next level with, and we have also been driving efficiencies. The most efficient thing we can all do right now to move Seattle forward is to proactively admit that voters have bounced the ball into my opponent's court and my opponent is going to take the ball and run with it right into the next generation. I think I speak for everyone when I say I sincerely hope he tags the base and keeps running. At the end of the day, customer service is the name of the game. It has been my great pleasure impacting you with television commercials demonstrating how well-resourced my bank account is, but it is now time to finalize this transition. My campaign does not expect a paradigm shift in getting our votes to the next level. Going forward, we are going to stop going forward. Part of the best practices in politics is the client-centric approach I have brought to shoring up support since the beginning of this campaign, if I can circle back for a second. This face time with me has been very empowering for you the stakeholders, and as well as for Africans. If this election had been held in Africa, I can assure you it would have been a win-win-win. Thank you.

If there's anything we're leaving out that Joe might want to say, put it in the comments. Meanwhile, what do you think is going to happen next?

Text message received last night from Craig Benjamin:

I'm no longer nervous as fuck.

Benjamin has been involved in the campaign longer than his daughter has been alive. Where did he celebrate the latest returns? He texted back: "At home with my family."

Mike McGinn, who could be Seattle's next mayor, is curled up 'round the fire with his family and black labrador, and couldn't be reached. Campaign spokesman Aaron Pickus reacts to the latest results, which put McGinn 2,400 votes in the lead. "It’s a big jump, and we feel pretty good," Pickus says. "But there are a lot of ballots yet to be counted and the race isn’t over."

So... are you gonna win? "Obviously, what we are seeing the right now is the same trend as primary, where voters favored Mike. Right now we feel very good."

"I haven't talked to the team yet," says Charla Neuman, spokeswoman for mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, "but I can tell you—uh, obviously this is not—it gets harder and harder to overcome these numbers. We're looking to see how many votes are left to be counted."

Is there any hope for Joe? "King County had another 30,000 votes dumped in today, which nobody would have expected—that's abnormally large," Neuman says. "We will wait and see, but it's not going in the right direction for us. We would have to see an immediate reversal in trend, I think, and an abnormally high one."

McGinn is now up by more than 2300 votes. That's outside the recount threshold and "Mallahan would now have to get about 54 percent of the remaining votes — a level he has never achieved in any of the vote counts," says the Seattle Times. The Times also called Mallahan's spokesperson and asked when the city can expect Mallahan to drive his concession forward. Her response is pretty desperate/hilarious:

"It'll be tough to overcome," she acknowledged. But she said a win is "still in the realm of possibility" and that the campaign wants to evaluate "oustanding factors."

For example, she said, there may have been some Seattle ballots in a vandalized ballot box in Tukwila.

* I added that "Right?" because I didn't want to jinx things.

Mayor

Mike McGinn 85416 50.31%
Joe Mallahan 83032 48.91%
Write-in 1328 0.78%

That's a 2,384-vote spread.

Reacting to the news that his lead in the mayor's race has grown both by number of votes and percentage of the vote, Mike McGinn says, “We were hopeful that the late ballots would trend our way like they did in the primary." McGinn believes that “the demographics of late voters were probably younger and more supportive of our campaign.” Indeed, records from King County Elections suggest that uncounted ballots may increasingly trend toward younger, McGinn supporters.

Is the race still too close to call? “Hey, we’re waiting to see what the next results show, but the trend looks positive for us now.” The next drop hits between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.

About 20,000 ballots just released by King County Elections show that Mike McGinn's advantage in the Seattle mayor's race is growing—slightly. McGinn had a 515-vote lead yesterday; now he leads Joe Mallahan by 1,209 votes. In terms of percentage of the vote, McGinn led by 0.4 percent yesterday, but he now has a 0.8 percent advantage.

Mayor

Mike McGinn 75,657 49.99%

Joe Mallahan 74,448 49.19%

Write-in 1240 0.82%

All the King County election results are here.