(Almost) Final VA results in - Dem loses AG by 947 votes

Update: Changed the title - while 100% of the vote is counted including absentees, the official official totals won't be officially made official for another couple weeks. After that point, Deeds has 10 days to ask for a recount, which the state will pay for since it is less than 0.5% difference. Also not every jurisdiction in Virginia uses touch screens.

Source: Va State board of elections.

With 100% of precincts reporting, and all votes counted, Bob McDonnell has 969,971 votes (49.98%), Creigh Deeds has 969,024 votes (49.93%) and McDonnell is the victor.

There will be a recount - it won't matter - it's all machine tallies that will just spit out the same sums.  No paper trails in Virginia.

A bit of commentary below.

Leslie Byrne lost by 23,000 votes out of nearly 2 million cast for Lt. Gov - she was a very liberal candidate.

I guess I'm happy that Kaine won by 5.7, over 110,000 votes, and I believe a bigger margin than Mark Warner.  However, I'm saddened that we could not get a Democratic sweep.  The Governor in Virginia is a very weak office in terms of official powers.  The Lt. Governor has absolutely no purpose in life unless the Governor dies - Tim Kaine was almost invisible as Lt. Gov except as spokesman for some initiatives.  Attorney General doesn't do much except run the bureaucracy of state prosecutors and represent the state of Virginia in lawsuits - cannot really impact policy because the AG doesn't make the law.  The biggest loss is that our next candidate for Governor will not have held statewide elected office the way Tim Kaine had.

I wonder aloud what would have happened if Howard Dean had chosen Virginia in the Spring as one of the states to receive the infusion of cash and paid staffers to rebuild the Democratic party here.  (Even in wealthy Northern Virginia, the party apparatus has some problems.  Prince William County didn't have a fax machine on election day 2004.  It was the 21st century and they didn't have a fax machine.  I wonder aloud if the November 15th "50 state strategy" could have helped us sweep some races if it had started on September 15th instead.  There were a couple house of Delegates races where we lost in a squeaker, and half the Republican Delegates ran unopposed.  Virginia state elections are always in off-years - I felt that Dean's objective was to get prepared for 2006 rather than 2005.

However, Kaine winning big is still huge for us.  And who knows, maybe someone will find another 1000 ballots for Deeds sitting in a locked box somewhere uncounted, or maybe there will be a voting machine that reported negative number of votes like they had in North Carolina last year.  So there's always hope.  Deeds is a State Senator, and the Senate is elected for 4 year terms all at once, so he still has 2 years to serve - meaning he's not going away.  Maybe he'll run again.  The name recognition and NRA endorsement may make him a good candidate for Governor the next go-round.

-Fred