Voters opt for change in Lynnwood, status quo in Mountlake Terrace

Published 2:43 pm Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Lynnwood voters appear to be making big changes to their city council, while Mountlake Terrace voters are keeping things the same.

Three of the four incumbent Lynnwood City Council members on the Tuesday, Nov. 3, general-election ballot all were trailing in votes counted through Monday, Nov. 9, while Mountlake Terrace incumbent council members were either leading or unopposed.*

As votes trickle in, Lynnwood Councilmen Van AuBuchon, Sid Roberts and Loren Simmonds appear to be losing, with Councilman Benjamin Goodwin holding a slight lead**, and Mountlake Terrace incumbent Council members Seaun Richards, Laura Sonmore and Bryan Wahl are winning.

In Lynnwood, AuBuchon trails challenger Shannon Sessions 57 percent to 43 percent, Simmonds trails challenger Shirley Sutton 57 percent to 43 percent, Roberts trails challenger George Hurst 54 percent to 46 percent, and Goodwin leads challenger Chris Frizzell by a 50 percent to 49.5 percent margin.

If the Lynnwood challengers defeat the incumbents, it would continue the trend that started in 2011, when AuBuchon, Goodwin and Roberts defeated incumbents. The trend continued in 2013, when the only incumbent to win was a council member who been appointed a year before, and when voters elected a new mayor and two new council members and elected a former council member who had been out of office for four years.

In this year’s Mountlake Terrace election, Sonmore leads challenger Steve Barnes 63 percent to 36 percent, and both Richards and Wahl are unopposed. This year’s election continues a trend from two year’s ago, when four council members won re-election to four-year terms and Wahl won election to the last two years of the position that he then held by appointment.

In Lynnwood, Goodwin led Frizzell Monday by just 23 votes, 0.44 percent of the 5,151 total votes for the two of them. The contest would have a recount if the margin would stay at no more than 0.50 percent. It would be a machine recount, unless the margin gets below 0.25 percent, the level that would trigger an automate hand recount.

Snohomish County elections officials have counted all ballots on hand except for about 4 percent that were spoiled and need to be prepared for counting. They also will need to count ballots that they have returned to voters to repair missing signatures or signatures that don’t match the signatures on file.

County officials will post updated returns each business day through final certification of results Nov. 24.

* An earlier version of this story said that all four Lynnwood incumbents were trailing.

* An earlier version of this story said that incumbent Lynnwood Councilman Goodwin was trailing.

Evan Smith can be reached at schsmith@frontier.com.