His statewide margin of victory was slightly over 31,000 votes out of about 1.4 million cast.

The county delivered more than half of Gov. George E. Pataki's winning statewide margin in 1994, and Republicans won 11 of 18 seats in the County Legislature last November.

As required by the statute, those requests set forth reasons, which included the extraordinary closeness of the statewide margin, as well as concern as to whether the vote totals reliably reflected the true will of the Florida voters.

Granted, some people, when prompted by a reporter, volunteered that they were proud she had won by 59 to 41 percent here - better than her statewide margin of 12 percent.

At the center is Mrs. Hutchison, who won last Saturday's election by the largest statewide margin for a Republican in Texas history and who today denounced the inquiry as a Democratic political stunt.

In 1988, George H. W. Bush ran up a 42,300-vote margin in Baltimore County over Michael Dukakis--almost 85 percent of his statewide margin of 49,800 votes.

King County election officials said recently that 348 provisional ballots were mistakenly counted, more than double Ms. Gregoire's statewide margin of victory.

As Edwards' statewide margin was 160,000, the survey concluded that African Americans made the difference.

Over all, the complete, unofficial count showed Mr. Spitzer with a statewide margin of 26,011 votes, out of 4.2 million cast.

Abbett was still declared the winner even though his entire statewide margin came from Hudson, which sent a large delegation to the inauguration to remind the new Governor of that fact.