Cook wins county assessor race; commissioner and prosecuting attorney should be settled today

Published 9:27 am Monday, November 10, 2014

POULSBO — Phil Cook will take office as Kitsap County assessor on Jan. 1.

You’ll have to wait until later Nov. 10 to know who the prosecuting attorney and District 3 county commissioner will be.

Elections supervisor Dolores Gilmore — who won the race for county auditor — said there are an estimated 800 ballots left to count. Those are ballots that were marked with pencil instead of ink pen, or have the write-in box checked but with a frivolous or no write-in candidate entered.

In addition, she expects her office will receive “a few more” late ballots that were postmarked on time.

Those 800 ballots “are not enough to make a difference” in the assessor’s race; Cook, a mortgage loan officer and property manager/landlord, leads Kitsap County data analyst Paul Andrews by 3,733 votes, according to Nov. 7 updated election results.

As for county commissioner and prosecuting attorney: “We’ll know more after the count today,” Gilmore said.

Bremerton lawyer Edward E. Wolfe, a former assistant U.S. secretary of state, leads incumbent Linda Streissguth by 1,202 votes in the race for county commissioner. If elected, Wolfe will be the sole Republican on the three-member board.

Public defender Tina Robinson, Republican, leads five-term incumbent Russell Hauge by 793 votes in the race for prosecuting attorney.

Gilmore is experienced in close elections. In her two decades as elections supervisor, she has presided over 20 recounts and four coin tosses.

“We do every election like there’s going to be a recount,” she said. “We’re ready to do what needs to be done on that.”