Bellevue - With only 51 votes separating the second- and third-place finishers in a bid for Washington’s high-stakes commissioner of public lands, the race is headed to an old-fashioned hand recount.

WAGOP-endorsed candidate Sue Kuehl Pederson, a scientist, and her political rival King County Council member Dave Upthegrove, a Democrat, are tied in a statistical dead heat. Both received 20.82 percent of the vote with 396,249 and 396,300 votes, respectively.

Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, a former Congresswoman and legislator, leads in first place with 419,297 ballots cast, or 22.03 percent of the vote.

According to WAGOP Chairman Jim Walsh, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs will soon be notifying all 39 counties about the hand recount, as mandated by state law.

“We will be aggressively reviewing all the 39 counties’ practices in their manual recount. We may also be raising in court some issues that we are concerned about in a few counties where cured ballots may not have complied with state law and best practices, “says Chairman Walsh.

“The gist of what’s going to happen is that we will be watching the review of those paper ballots like hawks. We are not going to sit idly by. We have our system already in place,” adds Chairman Walsh. “Our focus moves from aggressively curing those ballots to watching the recount and making sure that every vote gets properly counted. We are optimistic that Sue Kuehl Pederson will get through this primary and be on the general election ballot in November.”

“The race is the closest statewide race in the history of Washington’s primary, exceeding the 1960 superintendent of public instruction primary where A. T. Van Devanter and Harold L. Anderson were separated by 252 votes,” reads a press release from the Office of Secretary of State’s website.

Manual recounts, also known as hand recounts, of statewide races are required when the difference between the candidates is less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the total votes cast for both candidates, with a spread of fewer than 1,000 votes.

The commissioner of public lands oversees WA’s public timber lands and is also the elected head of the Department of Natural Resources, or DNR.

“The current Commissioner has wasted the renewable natural resources under her purview and instead wanted to tax citizens an additional $65 million annually to fight fires, rather than thinning out our forests to prevent fires while also earning revenues from timber,” reads Kuehl Pederson’s website. “Our Public Lands need to be opened up and better managed. We have the tools to do this; we need to use them to improve our economy, our health, and our schools.”