Peninsula Daily News news services
(EDITOR’S NOTE — We will continue to update this story as new vote tallies are reported.)
OLYMPIA — U.S. Sen. Patty Murray slightly widened her lead over Dino Rossi, her Republican challenger, as counties statewide counted tens of thousands of more mail-in ballots today (Wednesday).
As of 8:03 p.m., after Snohomish County had reported, a total of 1,629,088 votes had been tallied — and Murray had a 27,464-vote lead.
Murray had 828,276 votes, or 50.84 percent, to Rossi’s 800,812, or 49.16 percent.
The gap between her and Rossi increased today by about 13,000 votes from Tuesday night’s tally.
Murray, D-Bothell, is seeking her fourth six-year term. She has been ahead since the first vote counts Tuesday night.
Keeping to sustain Murray’s lead is a 71 percent voter turnout in King County, a record for a midterm election.
In vote counts released today, Murray’s lead in King County grew to 105,639 votes, and the spread widened 62.6 percent to Rossi’s 37.4 percent.
King County Elections director Sherril Huff said the county still has about 345,000 votes to count, and will be releasing results of an addition 65,000 ballots on Thursday.
The King County trend may bode poorly for Rossi. He got only 40 percent of the King County vote in his 2004 virtual tie with Gov. Chris Gregoire.
Hundreds of thousands of votes statewide are still uncounted.
Counts of mail-in ballots will continue all week in every county. Jefferson and Clallam counties will next report their new vote tallies on Friday.
To count, ballots needed to be postmarked by Tuesday, or put in a county dropbox by 8 p.m. Tuesday.
“No one knows how many ballots are left to count, since large volumes are in the mail and final return rate isn’t knowable,” said Dave Ammons, spokesman for Secretary of State Sam Reed, in an e-mail to seattlepi.com.
“Both sides have legitimate theories for a path to victory, but it’s far too close to see how the offsetting trends play out.
“In my view, this is one of those classic too-close-to-call races. We need to let the vote tally continue.”’
Speaking to cheering supporters, Murray, D-Bothell, sounded very confident Tuesday night that she was going to come out on top.
“We are winning tonight,” said Murray. “And we are going to win even bigger tomorrow. We are going to win this race.”
Rossi thanked supporters who were aware they probably weren’t going to know who won Tuesday night.
“Unfortunately, we don’t know what’s going to happen in this race yet,” Rossi told supporters in Bellevue.
“There’s still a lot of ballots to count, you know. But it’s Washington state. What are you going to do?”
“The good news is that the areas we do quite well in have a bigger turnout,” said Rossi. “but, we got a lot of counting still to do.”
