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Ten of the 11 counties in New York's 23rd Congressional District had complete or nearly complete results available Wednesday, not counting absentees, and using these numbers, 38.4 percent of active registered voters cast ballots in the congressional race.

Democratic and Working Families candidate Bill Owens got 49.3 percent districtwide, Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman got 45.2 percent, and Dede Scozzafava, who appeared on the Republican and Independence lines but had dropped out of the race Saturday, got 5.5 percent, according to the unofficial numbers.

Owens won more votes in counties with more registered Democrats, and Hoffman won more votes in counties with more registered Republicans - with one exception.

That exception is the county Hoffman lives in, Essex. Slightly more than half of the 16,618 active registered voters in the part of Essex County within the district are registered Republicans, and 44 percent of them voted in the congressional race - more turnout than in the district as a whole. However, Owens got 3,718 votes, or 50.8 percent, compared to 3,175 votes, or 43.3 percent, for Hoffman, according to unofficial numbers. Four-hundred and thirty two votes, or 6 percent, went to Scozzafava, who had thrown her support behind Owens, while the Republican Party switched their support to Hoffman.

Essex County is divided between the 23rd and 20th congressional districts; Hoffman lives in Lake Placid, in the 20th. The 23rd district includes much of the northern and western parts of the county and then follows the Lake Champlain coastline, taking in the towns of Crown Point, Minerva, Moriah, Jay, St. Armand, Westport, Willsboro, Wilmington, Newcomb, Elizabethtown, Chesterfield, Lewis and part of Ticonderoga.

Owens has his best numbers, 56.7 percent, in Clinton County, where he has lived for over 30 years and also the only county where Democrats clearly outnumber Republicans. Owens also won majorities in St. Lawrence and Franklin counties; both have more registered Democrats, but the difference is only a few hundred voters in each, and Republican plus Conservative voters outnumber Democratic plus Working Families voters in both.

In St. Lawrence County, where Scozzafava lives, Owens won 56.3 percent of the vote; his majority in Franklin was 51.7 percent. The only other county where he appears to have won a majority is Essex County. As for the other counties in Scozzafava's Assembly District, Hoffman won a 52.5-percent majority in Lewis County, and while he is ahead in Jefferson and Oswego counties, the two candidates are separated by about 500 votes in Oswego County and 120 in Jefferson County out of about 21,000 cast in each.

Hoffman appears to have won a majority in Oneida County, and he has about half of the votes in Hamilton County. Hamilton County, which is the most Republican in the district with 62.6 percent of registered voters in the GOP, also gave 12.5 percent of its vote to Scozzafava. Franklin County had the smallest number of Scozzafava voters, with 2.6 percent, with the other counties giving her between 5.2 and 7 percent of the vote. In Lewis County, 53.4 percent of active registered voters are Republican.

Only very incomplete numbers were available for Fulton County Wednesday, as ballots for four out of the county's nine towns within the 23rd District had been impounded without being counted due to malfunctions with machines that wouldn't scan ballots. A court order to impound all malfunctioning voting machines barred election workers from counting the ballots, said a Board of Elections worker. Right now, Hoffman has 1,010 votes, Owens has 819 and Scozzafava has 288, numbers that will "change drastically, we just don't know for whom," she said. Fulton is the second-most Republican county in the district percentagewise, with about 55 percent of registered voters.

The show-cause order, filed by Essex County Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Montgomery-Corey and signed by Supreme Court Justice Robert J. Muller, was filed "due to the fact that Essex, Clinton and Oneida counties utilize lever voting machines, which cannot accommodate the different registration cut-off dates for general and special elections," the petition says.

Michael Anich contributed to this report.