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Recount Fails to Overturn Va. GOP Victory NewsMax.com Wires RICHMOND, Va. -- A recount Wednesday upheld Republican Bob McDonnell's narrow victory for attorney general in the closest statewide election in modern Virginia history. McDonnell gained 37 votes in the statewide recount. The final vote, certified Wednesday night by a three-judge panel of the Richmond Circuit Court, was 970,981 for McDonnell and 970,621 for Democrat Creigh Deeds, a 360-vote margin. Deeds had demanded the recount after the State Board of Elections certified McDonnell the winner of the Nov. 8 election by a margin of 0.0166 of a percentage point. "I don't have any regrets," Deeds said after learning the results. "The whole experience of campaigning for statewide office has been humbling and gratifying for me." He called McDonnell and congratulated him on the victory after preliminary recount results showed he could not overcome the margin. McDonnell, weary but relieved, said Deeds wished him a merry Christmas. Story Continues Below
"It's been a long ride," McDonnell said. Totals from voting machines were rechecked in most of Virginia's 134 localities Tuesday. Results from each of the state's more than 2,500 precincts were sealed in envelopes, along with any challenged ballots, and delivered by state police to Richmond for a final tally and review by the judges. The court ordered more rigorous hand counts in 10 precincts where problems with voting equipment were documented. A few thousand old-fashioned paper ballots statewide also had to be recounted manually, and punch-card ballots in one Virginia Beach precinct were rerun through a tabulator because a printout of the original results could not be read. Virginia law allows a court-supervised recount when results fall within 1 percentage point. Taxpayers pick up the tab if the results are within one-half of 1 percentage point, although the campaigns must pay their lawyers and others helping them with the recount. McDonnell, who has represented Virginia Beach in the House of Delegates for 14 years, appeared to win by about 3,000 votes on election night. But the margin narrowed as mistakes were found in the routine canvass of results by electoral boards in the days after the election. Deeds, a state senator from rural Bath County, had pushed for the most intensive recount possible, though the court rejected his request to rerun more than 500,000 optical scan ballots through vote tabulators. In the only other statewide recount in modern Virginia history, Republican Marshall Coleman shaved 113 votes from Democrat L. Douglas Wilder's 7,000-vote advantage in the 1989 governor's race.
© 2005 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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