Katie Wilson promises transparency and honesty as she nears Seattle mayoral victory

The City of Seattle is moving closer to electing a new mayor after Tuesday’s ballot drop shows challenger Katie Wilson’s lead growing.

Wilson’s goal is to be more transparent than other mayors.

Up 1,350 votes over Mayor Bruce Harrell, Wilson told reporters she has plans of kicking off her first term tackling homelessness, but she expects bureaucratic obstacles will try and get in her way and slow down her agenda.

“But I think really being transparent and honest about what we’re doing and about the obstacles that we come up against, hopefully we can bring people along,” Wilson told reporters Tuesday night.

After Tuesday night’s ballot drop, which increased Wilson’s lead from less than 100 to more than 1,300 votes, Wilson said she may not be able to achieve all the changes she promised on time.

“Not going to be able to deliver everything that we want, everything that everyone wants, as fast as everyone wants it,” Wilson said.

There are 600 more ballots to count in the race. An additional 3,000 votes remain uncounted or won’t be counted because they were late.

Latest election data for Seattle mayoral race

Wilson currently has 50.1% of the vote (137,217 votes), compared to Harrell at 49.6% of the vote (135,871 votes), as shown on King County’s website.

“I’m feeling great right now. We’ve increased our lead from yesterday, and we’re actually just under the threshold where we can get out of the automatic recount territory,” Wilson said after seeing Tuesday’s election results. “I think it’s likely that we will increase our lead. We have hundreds of volunteers out across the city helping people to cure their ballots if their signature doesn’t match or if they forgot to sign it. So I really think that we will continue to inch ahead over the last few kind of straggling ballots that get counted, and, you know, we’re going to wait for everything to be counted. But I think I feel that we’ve won this race.”

Harrell is seeking to become the first re-elected mayor for Seattle since Greg Nickels in 2005. He has not conceded yet, as of this reporting.

“While not the direction we were hoping for, this remains a very close race, and we want to ensure every vote is counted,” Harrell’s campaign stated to KIRO Newsradio. “We are grateful to our volunteers, who continue to reach out to voters, and will see how the final ballots are tallied.”