Last week, we reported that the D.C. Democratic State Committee had laid out the process by which it would fill the soon-to-be-empty seat currently held by At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown. Of course, whoever gets the nod from the Democratic committee won’t be on the job long — according to the D.C. Home Rule Charter, a special election has to be held within four months of the vacancy.

Last night wasn’t what you would call a stellar evening for the D.C. Republican Party. Beyond not winning any of the races they claimed to be competitive in, the local branch of the GOP had one of its best showings with a candidate it didn’t even support.

Before the election, I had guessed they would garner 7,000 votes. But the committed movement to write-in Mayor Adrian Fenty was the driving force behind the casting of 27,828 write-in votes in yesterday’s general election, nearly 23 percent of the approximately 125,000 votes cast. The vote total is all the more impressive when one considers that the movement to write-in Fenty was working with almost no money and lacked the support of the candidate it sought to elect.

UPDATE (1:00 a.m.): All precincts have been accounted for; over 125,000 people voted, fewer than in the primary. (Same-day and absentee ballots haven’t yet been counted, but they won’t likely push the number above the primary.) Vince Gray claimed 90,000 votes, while the write-in campaign for Mayor Adrian Fenty notched a very impressive 27,000 votes, or 22 percent. More to come tomorrow.

Martin Austermuhle, DCist politics reporter/columnist, stick figure artist extraordinaire and recipient of two write-in votes for Mayor (no, I am not kidding), will be live tweeting from the headquarters of the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics tonight as the District’s votes are tallied. Polls in the District close at 8 p.m. You can follow along with Martin below.

As Aaron summarized in the Morning Roundup, tonight’s victory party for both presumptive Mayor-elect Vince Gray and presumptive Council Chair-elect Kwame Brown will take place at Love, the massive Northeast nightclub.

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics gets our tweet of the day award for this gem, describing what happened when a D.C. voter tried to use a stamp bearing Mayor Adrian Fenty’s name to cast their vote for him. Such stamps, which have been handed out by organizers of a small write-in movement that favors Fenty, are not an unprecedented strategy: a similar tactic was utilized by Mayor Anthony Williams’ campaign after Williams was knocked off the primary ballot in 2002. Of course, as this voter probably discovered, the stamps are meant to be used on paper ballots, not on electronic voting machines.

Vince Gray. Town hall. Ward 8. 1,200 people. You know the drill.

So far, the town halls hosted by presumptive Mayor-elect Vince Gray have been held in wards where he cleaned up (5, 7) or where he got his clock cleaned (2,3). But yesterday’s Ward 1 town hall was the first Gray convened in a ward that split about as close to even as the Democratic primary got: 60 to 40, in favor of Mayor Adrian Fenty. (Ward 6 is the other, having gone 55-45 for Fenty.)

The District’s Attorney General, Peter Nickles, has drawn plenty of criticism for not being independent enough from the man who appointed him, Mayor Adrian Fenty. But just across the river, Virginians have had to deal with Ken Cuccinelli, the commonwealth’s elected attorney general whose aggressive stances against everything from climate change to health care reform to anti-gay discrimination to the state seal have made even Republican Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell slightly uncomfortable.

Just two weeks from now, D.C. voters will be asked to decide whether they’re rather maintain the status quo or elect the city’s top law enforcement official starting in 2014. In essence, they’ll have to decide if they’d rather have a Nickles or a Cuccinelli.