Superbelt

So what if they lost two recounts?
The vote difference was 42 votes. To put it in perspective, that is less than one vote per county in Washington. That is within such a fine margin of error you should very much want to explore it closer to find out who the winner is. Machines make errors that people can pick out. And they are not going to keep recounting till they win. The last step, the definitive step, is a hand recount. After that the results are final. Hand counts can pick out things that an analytical computer program just isn't capable of.

i.e what they have been doing are starting to count votes that some dumbasses would check or put an x over the circle, rather than filling it in. Those votes would have been unreadable to the scan-tron. A human can make the obvious judgment call.
In an average election where there is anywhere from a 3 to 12 point difference in the candidates, those very small percentage of mistakes wouldn't ever make a difference anyway, in a difference of 3 dozen votes, they would.