As expected, Socialist Alternative challenger Kshama Sawant expanded her lead over 16-year incumbent Seattle City Council member Richard Conlin in today's ballot drop. She now leads by 402 votes, 49.99 percent to 49.75 percent.

Sawant's margins were way down from previous batches, at only 52.1 percent of the 6,418 ballots added to the count. But before Conlin supporters console themselves at the news, part of this was due to a chunk of write-in ballots added to the drop: 91 write-ins, or 1.4 percent of the drop, leaving Conlin with only 46.5 percent. By comparison, only 0.26 percent of all ballots in the race have contained write-in votes thus far. By my calculations, Conlin would need to win more than 51.2 percent of the remaining ballots to take the lead—a threshold that will only increase as Sawant adds to her lead and the number of ballots remaining dwindles.

In other races, SeaTac Prop 1, the $15 minimum wage initiative, is now leading by only 19 votes after the "no" side picked up 57.7 percent of today's 156 ballot drop. Honestly, this doesn't look good. And Seattle Prop 1, public campaign financing, only scored a 40-vote advantage out of 6,702 ballots counted—it now trails 49.2 percent to 50.8 percent, a likely insurmountable 2,926-vote margin. Ah well.