We did a recount last year in our attorney general race. It's not that big a deal, and it changed things by some, but not by 7000.
There's little to get 'wrong' here, most of our machines are electronic so a "recount" doesn't mean much, just looking again at absentee ballots.
I'm sorry we let the country down, my own county went for Webb, and I feel it is my fault for not working hard enough (I'd feel worse if it was 300 votes).
We've had some big errors in "initial reporting" before, like numbers transposed, so I'm holding out slight hope. If a 6100 turns into a 1600, that's a big deal (something like that happened last year in the AG race, which put it VERY close, but that would be something I wouldn't expect to find, especially not enough for 7000 votes).
I'm sorry, but Allen had to find those 7000 votes BEFORE the election, not after. He just couldn't close the deal, which is a shocker since he was a very popular Governor, but it seemed he hooked up with the wrong crowd to run his campaign and they couldn't keep from shooting themselves.
In the end, I think we lost more than 7000 votes when Allen's campaign directly released the Webb fiction and claimed it was a major issue in the campaign. That was a fine thing for bloggers to mess with, but not for a campaign trying to be serious about governing.
A lot of military people didn't find Webb's writings particularly out of bounds, and they thought it wrong for Allen to be attacking a man for writing about the military in a way they related to. It solidified I think the "war hero" mentality among a small but important segment of the population.
Meanwhile, Catholics really jumped over to the democrats on the war, here in Virginia, and Allen really did nothing to appeal to them. In fact, Allen tried sometimes to run a positive campaign but in the end it just couldn't cut through the atmosphere here.
Maybe the late-day rain hurt him as well. You can see the absentee ballots didn't help us in several cases, we did a bad job getting our people out to vote and we had less people to GET out to vote this time to start with.
Catholics are in for a rude awakening when Webb and the Democrats start to filibuster pro-life judicial nominees.
Our local Catholic church had "NO to Amendment #2" signs on its property. An active parishioner who lives across the street had Allen/Davis signs all across the yard.
I can't imagine any seriously practicing Catholics not understanding the difference between the parties, and the candidates who were running in VA. OR the consequences of a Webb vote for "Catholic issues.' So, if they voted for Webb, it's their bad.