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A hand recount in the Commissioner of Public Lands race shows that Democrat Dave Upthegrove has the votes to face off against former U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, the Republican who came in first place in the August primary. The mandatory recount found nearly identical results between the second- and third-place candidates.

Upthegrove defeated Republican Sue Kuehl Pederson for second place, with 396,304 votes to 396,255 – a difference of 49 votes. The total was finalized and updated after King County certified its votes on Wednesday. Upthegrove gained six votes in the recount and Kuehl Pederson gained four. The unofficial count was posted to the Secretary of State’s website on Tuesday, and was certified Wednesday at noon.

The recount was triggered when the initial count found that 51 votes out of 1.9 million cast separated them for second and third place after the primary was certified last month. Both campaigns “cured” thousands of ballots in the weeks between the primary day and the certification deadline by contacting voters whose ballots were rejected because of fixable errors.

In a primary, the state requires an automatic hand recount when the difference between the second- and third-place candidates is less than one quarter of one percent and also less than 1,000 votes.

In a top-two primary, the two candidates with the most votes face each other in the general election, regardless of party. This year in the Commissioner of Public Lands primary, about 42% of voters chose one of the two Republicans, and about 57% of voters chose one of the five Democrats. No single candidate got more than 22% of the vote.

The Commissioner of Public Lands position oversees the state’s Department of Natural Resources, which includes managing nearly six million acres of state-owned public lands and the state’s response to wildfires.

The general election is Nov. 5.

Update 3 p.m. September 4, 2024: This article has been updated with the certified and finalized recount numbers.

All services at the Seattle Public Library have been restored after a cyberattack took down all systems in May, according to the library’s account on social media platform X.

The public can now access public computers and all services that had been unavailable since the attack on Memorial Day. Other restored services include wi-fi, printing, the online catalogue, e-books and audio books. The library is also allowing people to return their books and other physical materials, after asking patrons to hold onto them during the outage.

After the cyberattack, the library had limited service through the end of the school year and during the summer, disrupting many heavily used programs. In 2023, the library logged more than 13 million checkouts and offered 340,000 public computer sessions at its 27 locations. During the ransomware attack, all public computers were shut off and people were unable to access their library accounts online.

Seattle Public Library had no clear idea of when all its services would return, but slowly brought them back up over the summer.

The Washington State Debate Coalition (WSDC) is hosting three free public debates ahead of the Nov. 5 general election. The debates will cover the races for attorney general, superintendent of public instruction and the Seattle City Council Position 8 seat. 

Debates will be in-person with live broadcasts from media partners, including livestreams on cascadepbs.org. Those attending in-person can submit questions for the candidates upon registering. 

The Coalition was founded in 2016 by Seattle CityClub and has produced public election debates all over the state, for both local and statewide races. The Coalition is supported by media, educational and civic organizations. 

A fourth debate scheduled for October between gubernatorial candidates Bob Ferguson and Dave Reichert has been cancelled. The debate would have included the participation of Cascade PBS and three other news outlets. 

Premier media partners for this year’s debate series include Converge Media, FOX 13, KUOW, RainierAvenueRadio, TVW and the Washington State Standard. 

For more information or to register in-person, visit seattlecityclub.org.  

• Seattle City Council, Citywide Position 8: Candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Tanya Woo will participate in a live debate at the Seattle Central College Auditorium on Wednesday, Sept. 18 at 7 p.m. The debate will be moderated by Cascade PBS city reporter Josh Cohen, John Hopperstad of FOX 13 and Angela King of KUOW.  

• Attorney General: Candidates Nick Brown and Pete Serrano will participate in a live debate at the Seattle Central College Auditorium on Thursday, Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. The debate will be moderated by Cascade PBS state politics reporter Shauna Sowersby, Laurel Demkovich of the Washington State Standard, Libby Denkmann of KUOW and Hana Kim of FOX 13.  

•  Superintendent of Public Instruction: Candidates David Olson and Chris Reykdal will participate in a live debate at the Edmonds Center for the Arts on Thursday, Sept. 26 at 7 p.m. The debate will be moderated by Cascade PBS associate news editor Venice Buhain, John Hopperstad of FOX 13, Sami West of KUOW and student panelist Kellyanna Brooking. 

Seattle’s newest experiment with citizen-led budgeting took a step forward on Aug. 16 when Mayor Bruce Harrell sent legislation to the City Council that will provide $27.25 million for six projects chosen by community members.  

The process, called participatory budgeting, allows community members to submit and vote on projects to fund. The city’s current effort grew out of the 2020 protests for racial justice as a response by the mayor and Council to protesters’ demands to shift funding away from policing and toward community priorities on health and safety.  

Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights managed the years-long process, including hiring a third-party organization to manage the initiative, hosting meetings, accepting proposals and finally voting on winning projects. Last fall, more than 4,200 people voted on 18 finalist projects to select the winning six. The city will spend:   

• $7.2 million on a community center for Native youth and Duwamish cultural education; 

• $7.2 million on a “community-operated restrooms program.” Community organizations selected by Seattle Parks will provide attendant oversight of at least five public bathroom sites, including two to three existing public bathrooms and two to three new mobile bathroom trailers;  

• $7 million to create and operate five publicly owned urban farms. Additional funds will be used to pay for training for small-scale agriculture producers;  

• $2 million to further expand CARE, Seattle’s new dual-dispatch police alternative that sends mental health professionals to respond to public behavioral health crises; 

• $2 million to expand “housing navigation services” to help people experiencing homelessness find and move into housing; 

• And $1.85 million for improvements to emergency shelters for youth experiencing homelessness.  

“Participatory budgeting moves us closer to building systems that increase agency for underrepresented communities in Seattle,” said Office of Civil Rights director Derrick Wheeler-Smith in a press release. “These projects are an opportunity for the city to be accountable to promises made in 2020 to create new ways to get civically engaged and invest in urgent needs of our most prevented and persecuted communities.”  

Seattle first tried participatory budgeting in 2015, with $700,000 for youth priorities voted on by Seattle residents and students ages 11-25. The effort expanded slightly in 2017 when the city set aside $2 million for parks and street projects that residents voted on.  

Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail 1 line will open its extension from Northgate to Lynnwood on Aug. 30. This 8.5-mile extension includes stops in Shoreline and Mountlake Terrace before ending at the Lynnwood City Center, where the transit center is located.

The new stops mean Link Light Rail now connects directly to Snohomish County for the first time. Sound Transit offers the Sounder commuter rail service that connects Everett and Tacoma to Seattle by train, as well as runs a light-rail system in Tacoma called the T line.

Lynnwood Link’s opening-day festivities include a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 11 a.m. with remarks from elected officials, board members and stakeholders. Riders can stop at the new stations in the afternoon to celebrate. Each station will have different festivities including activities, exhibits and entertainment hosted by community organizations.

The 1 line includes the Link Light Rail’s first line through Seattle. This extension will now allow riders to ride this line from the stations south of Seattle, like Angle Lake and SeaTac/Airport, to as far north as Shoreline and Lynnwood.  

Earlier this year, the long-anticipated 2 line opened, connecting Bellevue to Redmond. Also known as East Link, the 2 line will open more stations next year, including Marymoor Village and Downtown Redmond. The Interstate 90 bridge Link connection from Seattle to Redmond is also expected to open at that time, after that project was pushed back due to faulty concrete.

Gubernatorial candidates Democrat Bob Ferguson and Republican Dave Reichert are set to debate twice in September, after an announcement Thursday that an October debate would not take place. 

“I’m looking forward to both of our September debates with Dave Reichert,” Ferguson said in a Twitter post Friday. “Encouraging everyone to watch on September 10th and September 18th!”

A televised debate hosted by The Seattle Times and KING 5 News will occur at 8 p.m. on Sept. 10 in Seattle. 

The Sept. 18 debate will be in Spokane. The Association of Washington Business and Greater Spokane Inc. will host and NonStop Local KHQ-TV will broadcast the event at 6 p.m.

Initial reports that Ferguson “withdrew” from the Oct. 11 event, planned by the Seattle City Club, were “too strong of a description to summarize what happened,” the organization’s executive director, Alicia Crank, clarified in a post on social media site X Friday. 

Seattle City Club scheduled the October debate to take place at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, and would have included the participation of Cascade PBS and three other news outlets.

Crank explained that while both campaigns agreed to “save the date” for the event and had proactive follow-up from each candidate after the primary, the organization was told a “formal confirmation would come if the other side did so first.” 

She noted that Reichert’s campaign initially declined, but that Ferguson’s campaign said they would participate if Reichert’s campaign changed their mind. 

“In good faith, we kept the lines of communication going, and the Reichert campaign decided to commit,” Crank said. “After notifying the Ferguson campaign of this update, they chose without explanation to decline anyway.”

Ferguson’s campaign told Cascade PBS in a phone call that the claims of Ferguson pulling out or withdrawing from the debate were “inaccurate,” as a formal agreement had never been made.

Reichert told news site The Center Square in an email that he was disappointed about the outcome. 

“I urge him to change course and join me on stage on October 11,” Reichert wrote. 

Ferguson, the current state attorney general, and Reichert, a former Congressman and King County Sheriff, will face off in November’s general election.

Elections officials throughout the state will conduct a hand recount to determine who will appear on the general election ballot in the Commissioner for Public Lands race.

Just 51 votes separate Democrat Dave Upthegrove and Republican Sue Kuehl Pederson in the contest to face former U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican, who came in first place in the August primary. 

After the first count, Upthegrove has 396,300 votes to Kuehl Pederson’s 396,249. That’s a difference of 0.0064%. In a primary, an automatic hand recount is triggered when the difference between the second- and third-place candidates is less than one quarter of one percent and also less than 1,000 votes.

The Office of the Secretary of State said that county election offices estimate the manual recount will take seven business days to complete. The Office certified the results of the Aug. 6 primary on Thursday.

Before this, the closest statewide race in a Washington primary was the 1960 superintendent of public instruction primary, in which A. T. Van Devanter and Harold L. Anderson were separated by 252 votes, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. (Van Devanter made it to the general election, but lost to Louis Bruno.)

The Secretary of State’s Office reported that 1.9 million voters, a turnout of 40.9%, took part in the Aug. 6 state primary. That was a higher turnout than in 2022 (40.4%), but a lower turnout than 2020 (54.4%). 

The Washington State Patrol admitted to losing an unknown amount of emails and public records after a data migration failure last year led to the permanent deletion of those documents.

Internal communications reviewed by Cascade PBS warned that “hundreds of thousands” of emails were potentially missing, but Chris Loftis, the patrol’s communications director, told the news outlet in an email that “the specific extent of unrecoverable emails is yet to be fully realized” as the agency has “no accurate inventory or method to calculate the total number.” Loftis stressed that the initial speculation of hundreds of thousands of missing documents is now determined to be excessive.

The issue became known to State Patrol staff in mid-2023, and internal emails show the issue was first noticed when folders for certain lawsuits, which should have contained emails, legal filings and attachments, were found to be empty. Emails regarding audits, policy changes, accreditations and claims are also missing, as are certain vaccine mandate emails.

“Importantly, we do not foresee impacts on active or past investigations and criminal records as any email would be replicated and recorded separately as part of a case file,” Loftis added. “Thus, at this point, we see this as a procedural and administrative challenge and not a challenge to our core responsibilities in law enforcement.”

Internal communications at the State Patrol showed concerns that the records management department would be “hampered in civil legal defense for years to come” as a result of the missing documents.

“Not only will we be blind to information we need and surprised in litigation, we may need to duplicate huge volumes of work,” the email read.

Loftis said the agency continues to “monitor the situation to mitigate potential challenges related to the unrecoverable emails,” but that so far they have not seen any “material impacts” and “are hopeful that trend continues.”

Asked if the agency had notified the governor’s or attorney general’s offices of the missing documents, Loftis confirmed that both offices were notified after Cascade PBS began inquiring about the issue, but he was “not sure what other communications may or may not have transpired” since 2023.

Krist Novoselić, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West have qualified to be among the eight minor-party presidential candidates and one independent ticket to appear this November on Washington’s general-election ballot. Barring challenges, they are slated to appear alongside the Republican and Democratic nominees for president.

The minor-party and independent tickets qualified for the general-election ballot with 1,000 signatures gathered during a state convention this year. Parties and candidates were notified Tuesday of their qualification for the Washington ballot.

The Republican Party, which held its convention in July, has nominated former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as its presidential ticket. The Democratic Party certified its presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz earlier this month.

At stake are Washington’s 12 votes in the electoral college. Novoselić has said he is running only so that a new centrist party, the Cascade Party of Washington, will be recognized as a bona fide minor political party in this state.

The minor parties, presidential candidates and running mates are:

• We the People Party: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Nicole Shanahan
• Green Party: Jill Stein, Samson LeBeau Kpadenou
• Socialism and Liberation Party: Claudia De la Cruz, Karina Garcia
• Socialist Workers Party: Rachele Fruit, Dennis Richter
• Socialist Equality Party: Joseph Kishore, Jerry White
• Libertarian Party: Chase Oliver, Mike ter Maat
• Cascade Party: Krist Novoselić, James Carroll
• Justice for All Party: Cornel West, Melina Abdullah
• Independent candidate: Shiva Ayyadurai, Crystal Ellis

Challenges to their nominations must be filed in Thurston County Superior Court by five days after the candidates were notified. The Washington Democratic Party is challenging Kennedy’s nomination, saying the signatures were not gathered at a party convention, according to the Washington State Standard.

General-election ballots will be mailed on Oct. 18 and must be returned by Nov. 5. On that ballot, alongside president, Washington voters will also choose the winners of ten statewide races, including governor, attorney general, U.S. senator, all its congressional representatives and a large portion of the state legislature, as well as weigh in on statewide ballot measures.

Correction Aug. 19, 2024: An earlier version of this story listed the incorrect number of statewide races.

Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz has conceded in her race to represent Washington’s 6th Congressional District.  

As of Thursday afternoon, Franz had placed third in the open seat contest with 25.6% of the vote, behind fellow Democrat Emily Randall with 33.7% and Republican Drew MacEwen with 30.3%.  

In a statement Thursday, Franz said she called Randall, a state senator from Bremerton, to congratulate her win in the primary and said they needed to work together to keep the seat Democratic and move the House toward a Democratic majority.  

“It is time for us to work harder than ever so we can flip the House, defeat Donald Trump and defend our democracy,” Franz said.  

Franz’s concession ends her nearly yearlong run to move up from her current state executive office. Franz briefly campaigned for governor before shifting to a run for Congress after U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer announced his retirement. Kilmer endorsed Franz for the position.  

The district includes the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas and large swaths of Tacoma.