A precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Nov. 3 Sammamish City Council election demonstrates that 
Ramiro Valderrama faced only token opposition, and therefore Sammamish Comment hasn’t spent a lot of time analyzing his race against Hank Klein. Klein dropped out of the race too late to take his name off the ballot. He didn’t campaign or raise money.
Here’s what The Comment’s analysis found:
Although votes are still being counted and the election results won’t be certified until Nov. 24, Christie 
Malchow and Tom Hornish have been elected to the Sammamish City Council; their Election Night margins were too great for Mark Cross and Tom Vance to overcome. Their vote tallies have only increased each day additional votes have been tabulated.
So the questions become, What’s next? What’s next for the balance of 2015 in what is now a lame duck period of the City Council, and What’s next in 2016?
Click on image to enlarge.
How did two veterans of Sammamish public service lose their bids for election to the City Council in the Nov. 3 election to two unknown newcomers to the City?
They also had an unwitting helping hand from their own Deputy Mayor, whose obsessions galvanized the opposition to upset her allies.
This is the inside story of how Mayor Tom Vance lost to two-year resident Tom Hornish and how former Mayor and Council Member Mark Cross lost a comeback bid to a feisty young Mom in tennis shoes, Christie Malchow, invoking remembrances of another tennis shoe Mom campaign in Washington long before Malchow moved here.
With six days to do to the November 3 election, in which three positions for the Sammamish City Council are on the ballot, City ballot returns through Oct. 26 are a dismal 7.8% of registered
This is fractionally behind neighboring cities, Issaquah, Redmond and Kirkland, which are hovering around 8% ballot returns. Bellevue is slightly higher at 8.4%. All of King County, including Seattle where there are City Council races, is hovering around 8% ballot returns so far.
Off-year elections typically have dramatically lower voter turnout than presidential years or mid-term years in which the top of the ballot has a US Senator race. In Washington, the governor is elected in the same year as the president and mid-term elections have a US Senate seat at the top of the ballot.
City Council races are in the odd years, and don’t draw much in the way of turnout. Top top-of-the-ballot office races in King County are for Assessor and Director of Elections, two yawners that won’t help draw voters.
The top ballot initiative this year is I-1136, another Tim Eyman tax initiative that most people believe will be ruled invalid in a court challenge should it pass. A number of arcane advisory votes are on the ballot.
Eighty five percent of Sammamish voters typically turn out in a presidential election. This historically drops to 50% or less in an odd-year election. But since the City Council races are “down ballot,” by the time voters get down to these races, the actual voter participation is even lower.
Sammamish Comment has charted the statistics in three recent odd-year elections:
Openness and transparency in Sammamish have taken another hit as Mayor Tom Vance and Deputy Mayor Kathy Huckabay appear to have withheld emails requested under
Tom Vance
the State Public Records Act.
This is especially ironic because Huckabay, in a last-minute email and letter-writing campaign against Council Member Ramiro Valderrama, who is seeking reelection, and candidates Tom Hornish and Christie Malchow, has made openness and transparency her top point against these three.
Sammamish Comment filed a multi-part Public Records Request (PRR) August 27 in pursuit of several stories that subsequently were posted as information was developed through interviews and records. Included in that multi-part request was the following:
Request #2:
Subject: All emails from the City server and the personal email accounts:
Kathy Huckabay
City Clerk Melonie Anderson responded Thursday last week:
Sammamish Comment 