Hand Recount Continues in Governor's Race
As of Saturday night, Republican Dino Rossi had a net gain of 28 votes over Democrat Christine Gregoire.
The count is just beginning in King County. Just by the shear number of votes, King County will likely be a huge influence in the outcome of the recount.
Election workers were scheduled to be done with their initial count of the poll votes Saturday night. But then there are still more than 500,000 absentee ballots that will have to be counted.
King County elections was a little ahead of schedule, though the folks there are still saying officially they'll be done by Dec. 22.
Election workers couldn't say how the numbers were trending or who was picking up votes because it was still too early in the process for that.
But when asked if they were seeing discrepancies in the totals between the machine recount and the hand recount, "I think there could be, there could be those types of things and that's what we'll be looking at in the coming days is for anomalies," explained King County Elections Director Dean Logan. "Then we're going to go back and try to figure out where that happened and get a final result, but it's still too early to give a real definitive response on that."
Overall, with the 28 votes he's picked up in the 17 counties that have finished their hand recount, Rossi was leading Gregoire by 70 votes.
The actual counting phase of the hand recount also started in Pierce County Saturday. The county hopes to have results by next Friday.