The tedious process of figuring out who is South Carolina's next Superintendent of Education rolls on. On Friday, the Elections commissions certified the results of Tuesday's election, and found that Democrat Jim Rex does indeed have the lead by 507 votes. The margin has bounced around a bit since election night, but Rex has always had a narrow lead and the general trend has been for it to grow. What's different today is that all the votes have now been counted, so the Karen Floyd camp can no longer pin their hopes on uncounted absentee or provisional ballots.
But it's still not over. Since the margin of victory is less than 1%, a mandatory recount will commence Thursday. After that, it's likely that K-Flo will file a protest. Apparently she's got nothing to lose by doing this, and up to this point she's shown no signs of bowing out gracefully. What exactly such a protest would mean and what good it might do her I have no idea, but that's where everyone expects this to go.
Still, now that all the votes have been counted, I'm confident that Rex is going to end up the winner once all the dust settles. But we'll have to wait until after next week to be sure.
