Joe Mallahan

Let me first start by saying that this is a far-fetched theory, but I am going to float it anyway. Did the massive network outage at T-Mobile USA yesterday cost wireless executive Joe Mallahan a few votes in the Seattle mayoral election?

The race is too close to call, and Mallahan could still eke out a victory. But he's still trailing environmentalist Mike McGinn by less than a thousand votes. That news comes even though many pre-election polls -- including a TechFlash poll -- showed the T-Mobile executive holding slight leads.

Of course, since this election was held entirely by mail, many voters in Seattle had already cast their ballots by the time T-Mobile's problems surfaced on Tuesday. Nonetheless, in tight races like this one, every vote counts.

There's probably a very, very small percentage of Seattle voters who procrastinated with their ballots, and may have been impacted by the outage which started at about 2:30 p.m. on election day.

Mallahan once held the title of vice president of customer delight at T-Mobile, so having customers of his company on the day of the election saying things like "I am really beginning to hate T-Mobile" probably didn't help matters.

And taking this theory one step further, one could imagine that Mallahan (and many of his key staffers) utilized T-Mobile as their preferred wireless carrier. It is unclear whether Mallahan or anyone else in his campaign lost service.

But if they did, that could have created a horrendous communications bottleneck at a crucial time when staffers were making a final push to get the vote out. (And, if nothing else, Seattle Weekly's Mike Seely called the outage an "ominous sign.")

We did hear from a Seattle reporter friend and T-Mobile customer who was covering the election last night, and couldn't access his service. That made his job especially hard, so you can imagine what it would have been like if dozens of Mallahan campaign workers couldn't communicate with one another.

We were actually somewhat surprised by the results of the TechFlash poll. We thought that a Seattle technology executive would potentially poll higher among our geeky audience. But the TechFlash poll of 455 votes showed McGinn with 43 percent of the vote to Mallahan's 45 percent.

As I said, this is a far-fetched theory that T-Mobile cost Mallahan the election. But -- for anyone who remembers the words "hanging chad" -- we all know that elections have been won and lost on what at the time appears to be minor glitches.