A spokesman for Washington’s secretary of state said that all votes had not yet been counted in the race to succeed Frank Brouillet, who is retiring from the nonpartisan post.
As of Nov. 10, Ms. Billings had won 745,121, or 50.4 percent, of all votes counted. Mr. Heck, a former state representative and House clerk, had received 732,321 votes, or 49.6 percent.
The spokesman said Mr. Heck could not demand a recount until all the ballots had been tallied.
Three other states also held4elections for their top education posts last week.
In Indiana, the Republican incumbent, H. Dean Evans, won by 55 percent to 45 percent over Mary Petterson, a high-school science teacher and a four-term Democratic state representative.
North Carolinians, meanwhile, chose State Representative Bob Etheridge, a Democrat, as their new school chief. He won 54 percent of the vote, compared with 46 percent for Tom Rogers, a teacher at a state correctional school.
And in Montana, Nancy Keenan, a Democratic special-education teacher from Anaconda, defeated Barbara Foster, a retired teacher from Townsend, by 61 percent to 39 percent.
In another closely watched con9test, Texans chose 11 new members for the state board of education as the 15-member panel returned to elective status.
Switch After Reform
The panel’s members were elected until 1984, when the legislature approved a far-ranging school-reform law. That measure switched the board to an appointive body for four years to protect members from political influence while the reforms were implemented. The state returned to an elected board this year.
Only six members of the appointive board sought election to the new panel. One lost a primary fight, leaving five in last week’s race, two of whom ran unopposed. One of the three incumbents in contested races was defeated.--tm & nm
