''Wooo-hooo!" exulted state Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost moments after the results were announced. ''We're very excited. We always believed she would win."
Secretary of State Sam Reed is scheduled to certify the election Dec. 30. After that, the election results probably will be challenged in court, or possibly the Legislature.
State law allows any registered voter to challenge election results, and Republicans have begun asking that elections officials reconsider votes for Rossi that they say were wrongly rejected.
''We're going to be going across the state demanding they make every vote count," Rossi spokeswoman Mary Lane said earlier yesterday.
Meanwhile, a recount completed yesterday of Puerto Rico's gubernatorial election gave Anibal Acevedo Vila the lead, but election officials will not certify a winner until Tuesday and Acevedo's main opponent had not decided whether to mount a legal appeal.
Jose Corrales, a spokesman for Puerto Rico's electoral commission, said the recount of the ballots cast Nov. 2 was finished late yesterday but an official certification would not be issued until next week because of the upcoming holidays.
In Washington, Gregoire, 57, a three-term state attorney general, was widely viewed as the anointed successor to Governor Gary Locke, a Democrat. Rossi, 45, a real estate agent and former state senator, jumped into the race only after the GOP's first three choices declined.
Democrats hold the majority in Washington's Legislature, both US senators are Democrats, and John F. Kerry won 53 percent of the statewide vote. But Washington voters also flaunt a strong independent streak, and Rossi's sunny message of change caught on with swing voters.
After Rossi won the first two counts, Democrats paid $730,000 for the hand recount. By law the state has to repay the party if the recount reverses the results.
''We asked for a hand count because we knew machines make mistakes," Brost said.
During the hand recount, King County election officials discovered that hundreds of ballots had been mistakenly rejected because of problems with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the computer system.
