Ensign admits defeat to Reid

Thursday, Dec. 10, 1998 | 11:21 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Thirty-six days after Nevada's Senate election was held, Sen. Harry Reid was finally declared the winner Wednesday.

Challenger John Ensign threw in the towel at 9 p.m. Wednesday after Washoe County completed its recount. "I'm at peace with the outcome," Ensign told a news conference in Las Vegas.

Ensign telephoned Reid to concede and to congratulate him. Reid said Ensign, a two-term Republican congressman, ran a good campaign and that he "wished him best of luck in his future endeavors."

Ensign didn't rule out a return to politics, but he added that he didn't have any immediate plans. He said he enjoyed being a congressman more than he thought he would.

In one of the closest and most negative statewide races in Nevada history, Reid won a 401-vote victory in an outcome certified by the Nevada Supreme Court on Nov. 25.

Ensign, who intends to return to his veterinary practice in Las Vegas, asked for a recount, pinning his hopes on Washoe County where there were misprinted and misshaped ballots, problems with absentee ballots and computer crashes. The GOP said there were hundreds of missing votes and ballots that may have not been counted.

The Republicans hoped another tabulation in Washoe County, where the GOP holds a registration edge of more than 16,000 voters, would overturn the election outcome.

The recount backfired, showing that Ensign and Republicans were wrong. In the tally completed early today (Thursday), Ensign lost 32 votes and Reid gained six in Washoe County. The county's final totals gave 46,300 votes to Ensign and 44,118 to Reid.

Final statewide recount results showed Reid with 208,650 votes to Ensign's 208,222, a margin of 428.

Washoe County Voter Registrar Laura Dancer said the recount ended up with 60 fewer votes than had been certified by the Washoe County Commission on Nov. 12. "The results of this recount reveal that, overall, there is basically no change in the outcome of the election. The changes we see are in absolute vote numbers -- not percentages -- and the end results remain the same."

Ensign had announced his concession before Dancer released her final figures. He said he would like to see a law mandating an automatic recount if an election is decided by less than 1 percent of the vote. And he hopes the Legislature takes a "good, hard look" at the vote-counting process in Washoe County so that problems such as those encountered this year can be remedied.

But Reid said the recount "shows the system works. ... It's a process of integrity."

He praised the work done in the recount in both Clark and Washoe counties. "The voters of Nevada can feel confident that their voices have been heard and their votes have been counted accurately."

Asked whether this close election would moderate any of his positions, Reid said, "I can't be anybody else, no matter if the vote was 401 or 400,000. I will do my best to represent the people of the state ... those who voted for me and those who voted against me."

He noted that he won by 23,000 votes in Clark County but gathered only 21 percent in Churchill County, where he has been criticized for his stand on water issues. "I'm going to represent Churchill County just like I do Clark County," he said.

Reid won only Clark and Mineral counties out of the 17 counties in Nevada.

Reid, elected as Democrat whip in the Senate, said he will be a "potential juror" if the House approves articles of impeachment against President Clinton. "I'm keeping my options open and being an impartial witness."

Jack Finn, press secretary for Ensign, said the congressman will return to Washington, D.C., if the full House votes on impeachment before January. Finn, who will become press secretary for Gov.-elect Kenny Guinn, said Ensign has requested transcripts of the testimony and has been monitoring media accounts of the House Judiciary Committee proceedings.

In the past few days, he said Ensign also has been playing golf and spending time with his family in Las Vegas.

Spending by the Senate candidates and their political parties totaled more than $12 million during the campaign, much of which featured negative advertisement about each of the candidates.

The day after the election, Reid had a 459-victory margin. But Dancer discovered discrepancies in Washoe County. She secured a court order to unseal nearly 6,000 ballots because they were misshaped and the computer had not accurately counted them. That took a week of hand-counting and computer tabulation. The computer crashed several times as the experts tried to override the security system to get a correct number.

Reid lost 58 votes in the first recount by Washoe County to narrow his margin to 401 votes.

After Washoe County completed its second recount Wednesday night and the word leaked out that Ensign had failed to overtake Reid, staff members of the senator hugged each other and shouted with joy.

Ensign's campaign manager, Mike Slanker, said, "Everybody's suspicions were right.

"Hundreds of votes were found. Unfortunately, Sen. Reid got some of them."