(Karen Ducey/Getty Images)
When counting the votes wrapped On Tuesday night, Dave Upthegrove appeared to have defeated Sue Kuehl Pederson by just 51 votes — out of 1.9 million cast — for second place in the primary for Washington state lands commissioner.
It is one of the closest elections for statewide office in Washington history.
If the result holds, it means Upthegrove, a Democrat, will narrowly advance to the general election, facing Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler. But there are more steps in the process. The hair-trigger margin will trigger a mandatory hand recount.
Tomorrow, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs’ office will consolidate the county election results filed today and prepare the related documents. Hobbs is expected to certify the primary results on Thursday and immediately order a recount in the race for county commissioner.
Each county will then notify candidates and parties of the date, time and location of their local portion of the recount. How long the recount may take for counties to complete depends on how many ballots they process and other factors.
Stuart Holmes, Washington’s elections director, said Tuesday that the secretary of state’s office has sent out a survey to all 39 counties to gauge the time it will take. “Some estimates are as high as 10 days, and some are as low as one day,” he said in an interview.
There has been a lot of attention for the race in recent days aimed at ‘curing’ ballots that had been submitted but were contested and not yet counted – due to problems such as voter signatures not matching those in the election office files.
Holmes explained that voters had until the end of the day Monday to turn in forms to the county auditors’ offices to have ballots altered. He stressed that no new ballots—altered or otherwise—would be included in vote counts after Tuesday.
Washington law in this case requires a machine recount if the difference between the candidates is less than 0.5% of the total votes cast for both candidates and also less than 2,000 votes. A manual recount is required if the difference is less than 1,000 votes and less than 0.25%.
Upthegrove was optimistic despite the close result. It was a race in which five Democrats split the party’s voters, leaving two Republicans likely to advance to the general election.
“I am incredibly grateful to the hundreds of volunteers who worked with our campaign this past week to help voters fix problems with their ballots so their votes would count,” he said in a statement. “In a race that was so close, that made all the difference.”
“Our campaign is moving full steam ahead into November,” he added.
Pederson’s campaign manager said the campaign would not comment Tuesday night.
The land commissioner leads the Department of Natural Resources and oversees nearly 6 million acres of public lands, including about 3 million acres of state lands that generate revenue — primarily from logging — for schools, counties and other parts of government.
The lands the agency manages are also open to recreation, and some generate revenue from activities such as agriculture, aquaculture and commercial real estate. The department has about 2,200 employees. And it is the state’s primary wildfire management agency.
If Upthegrove advances to the November ballot, it will be a close race.
Herrera Beutler served six terms as a congresswoman from Southwest Washington, but lost a re-election bid in the 2022 primary after voting to impeach former President Donald Trump, who is running for president again this year.
She has pledged to resist political pressure to clear more logging areas for conservation and to support the permanent staff who oversee timber sales.
Upthegrove, chairman of the King County Council, has made preserving older, but not necessarily old-growth, forests a priority,heritage forests“on state land is a central part of his campaign and has broad support from environmental groups.
The most exciting state primary to date was in 1960 in the race for superintendent of public instruction, Holmes said. That contest was decided by 252 votes.
In 2004, the gubernatorial race was decided by just 133 votes after multiple recounts, with Democrat Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, defeating Republican Dino Rossi. At the time, it was certainly the closest gubernatorial race in U.S. history.
Holmes said he was not aware of a recount in the state’s history that changed the initially reported election outcome.
“I“In no case do we have any evidence of a recount that actually overturned the outcome of the race,” he said.
