Updated: SK Races Worth Watching

ORIGINAL POST, 2:45 P.M. THURSDAY: If you backed Republican Tim Matthes for county commissioner, my caution would be to not get too excited. When all the votes are counted, he’s still likely to be on the losing end of this thing. However, he made up some ground Wednesday with some of the late votes, as reported.

After the primaries it became clear that Republican numbers in some key races improved as more late ballots were counted. I did some math yesterday using the one-day results in the race between Matthes and Democrat Charlotte Garrido and determined that if the numbers came in late in the same proportions as Wednesday’s, Matthes still loses.

In the race for the 26th District, to me it points to Republican Jan Angel increasing her lead. Not only are we using the assumption that Republicans do better with later votes, but much of what hasn’t been counted is from Pierce County, which favors Republicans in the 26th District. In fact, new Pierce County numbers came in since I wrote the story I linked, and Angel’s lead increased by eight-tenths of a percentage point. She now has 51.8 percent, while Democrat Kim Abel is at 48.2.

My caution to Matthes supporters is tempered by experience. After the primary I did some calculations on the second-place contest in the 35th District that Kathy Haigh won. My math, based on what was still left to count, had Bremerton City Councilman Brad Gehring overtaking Belfair’s Marco Brown. The math was fine, but the assumptions were wrong. Later numbers favored Brown and put it out of reach of an automatic recount. Chances are in both races that Tuesday’s results will hold up. But it doesn’t hurt to keep watching the new numbers.

UPDATED, 5:50 P.M. THURSDAY: OK, this latest batch of numbers today were more favorable to Matthes than the ones yesterday. Here’s the text of the story we’ll have in Friday’s paper:

The lead for Kitsap County commissioner candidate Charlotte Garrido got smaller for the second straight day Thursday, with more ballots being counted.

Garrido, the Democrat vying for the seat representing the county’s southern district, had about a 4-percentage-point lead on election night. With the latest numbers she leads Republican Tim Matthes by about 2 percent. The latest numbers show Garrido with 47,251 votes, about 50.9 percent. Matthes has 45,368, about 48.9 percent.

Ballots turned in later in the voting cycle have favored Matthes. After Wednesday’s count it appeared Matthes would shrink the lead, but fall way short of the half-percentage point difference needed to spark an automatic recount.

If the ballots still to be counted come in at the same rate Thursday’s did, Matthes would miss a recount, but not by a lot.

The latest numbers from the 26th Legislative District race between Republican Jan Angel and Kim Abel show Angel has expanded her lead by about a percentage point after the latest numbers from Kitsap County. Angel has about 51.9 percent of the votes, while Abel has about 48.1 percent. Pierce County’s latest numbers were posted Wednesday.

UPDATED, 4:40 P.M. FRIDAY: The newest numbers were again higher for Matthes than Garrido, but it appears still that Matthes will fall short, now by about 1,000 votes out of about 115,000. That would also mean he won’t qualify for an automatic recount.