Hamdi Mohamed passes Stephanie Bowman in tight race for Port of Seattle Position #3

Late this after­noon, with the release of King Coun­ty Elec­tions’ third tal­ly of bal­lots in the Novem­ber 2021 gen­er­al elec­tion, Ham­di Mohamed over­took Stephanie Bow­man for Posi­tion #3 on the Seat­tle Port Commission.

Behind by 5,600 votes on Elec­tion Night and behind by 4,020 votes yes­ter­day evening, Mohamed today jumped out to a lead of 9,610 votes over Bow­man. 459,686 total bal­lots have been count­ed by King Coun­ty Elections.

211,576 bal­lots have been cast for Mohamed and 201,966 for Bowman.

Mohamed now has 50.93% of the vote and Bow­man has 48.62%. Mohamed is the sec­ond 2021 Port chal­lenger to over­take an incum­bent in the late bal­lots, fol­low­ing Toshiko Grace Hasegawa, who leapfrogged Peter Stein­brueck yes­ter­day.

King Coun­ty Elec­tions reports that almost 607,000 bal­lots have been returned, and has esti­mat­ed that turnout may reach 46% in the Novem­ber gen­er­al elec­tion. If King Coun­ty Elec­tions’ esti­mate proves true, then we are almost two thirds of the way done with tab­u­lat­ing the votes in this election.

If you haven’t been pay­ing close atten­tion to this race for Port Com­mis­sion, here’s our primer from Tues­day about the matchup.

Mohamed vs. Bowman: The contest for Position #3

Bow­man has cam­paigned on her record of fos­ter­ing job cre­ation at the Port, her efforts to tack­le cli­mate dam­age, and the Port’s part­ner­ship with the Port of Taco­ma through the North­west Sea­port Alliance.

She has also cit­ed expand­ing job train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for youth of col­or, mak­ing stormwa­ter improve­ments, and devel­op­ing a noise insu­la­tion pro­gram for homes close to the air­port as accomplishments.

But she has also been crit­i­cized for tak­ing a posi­tion oppos­ing SeaT­ac’s min­i­mum wage ordi­nance, and her 2015 vote to allow Shell Oil to locate its Arc­tic drilling oper­a­tions in Seattle.

Mohamed present­ly works as an advis­er to the King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Office regard­ing the county’s bud­get, small busi­ness ini­tia­tives, com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment and the county’s COVID-19 response.

Her father was a truck­er and her moth­er was a Sea-Tac air­port work­er, and that expe­ri­ence led her to desire the cre­ation of both re-entry pro­grams for COVID-19-impact­ed work­ers and a new Small Busi­ness Recov­ery Taskforce.

She says she is com­mit­ted to mak­ing the Port a key play­er in address­ing cli­mate change and its broad electrification.

Mohamed resides in South King Coun­ty, not far from Seat­tle-Taco­ma Inter­na­tion­al Air­port. South King Coun­ty has his­tor­i­cal­ly lacked rep­re­sen­ta­tion on the Port Com­mis­sion. If Mohamed wins, the com­mu­ni­ties close to the Port’s largest facil­i­ty would have more clout on its five-mem­ber gov­ern­ing body.

Updated numbers are due tomorrow afternoon

King Coun­ty Elec­tions’ next bal­lot drop will be released some­time tomor­row after­noon, like­ly between 4 and 5 PM Pacif­ic Time. That drop may be as large as  today’s, with a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of bal­lots expect­ed to be tallied.