Nickels falls further behind in latest vote count

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels fell further behind as new vote totals were released this afternoon, remaining in third place behind challengers Mike McGinn and Joe Mallahan.

Nickels now has 25.19 percent of the vote compared with 26.48 percent for McGinn and 26.76 percent for Mallahan. The top two vote-getters move on to the Nov. 3 general election.

Mallahan has now edged out McGinn for the lead, but plenty of ballots remain to be counted. Nickels trails McGinn by more than 1,000 votes in the race for second place. Tuesday night, he was within 455 votes of second place.

King County released a count of about 34,000 new votes this afternoon, including nearly 16,000 from Seattle.

At least another 70,000 ballots have been received by the county and will be counted in the next couple days, according to King County Elections.

Nickels campaign spokesman Sandeep Kaushik said the mayor is not conceding and the situation could change as more votes are counted.

"There is still a real possibility that we can turn this around," he said.

Jim Brunner: 206-515-5628 or jbrunner@seattletimes.com