New Senate whip Reid finally celebrates re-election

Scott Sonner

Friday, Dec. 11, 1998 | 11:30 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - Please excuse the new Senate minority whip if he's seemed a little preoccupied.

"I have to be honest, my mind has been diverted from those responsibilities the last few weeks," Sen. Harry Reid said Thursday.

The Nevada Democrat spent the past 38 days waiting for his narrow re-election to a third term to be made official against Republican Rep. John Ensign.

On Thursday, a statewide recount of all 415,000 ballots ended - and Reid won by 428 votes.

"This has been an election night that took five weeks," Reid said in a belated celebration on the federal courthouse steps outside his Reno office.

"Even though it did take five weeks, it proved the system works," he said.

The recount ended up adding 27 votes to his earlier 401-vote margin - a final advantage over Ensign of one-tenth of 1 percent.

While Reid praised the recount effort, he railed against the election process that he says has been corrupted by corporate money. He vowed to use his new position as assistant Democratic leader to overhaul campaign election laws and ban corporate contributions to political parties.

"This wasn't a race between Harry Reid and John Ensign," Reid said Thursday.

"It was a race between all these negative interests. The Democratic state party and the Republican state party spent $12 million in negative ads," he said.

"We've got to stop the corporate money that I think is corrupting the system," he added.

Campaign laws limit the amount of money individuals and political action committees can contribute to individual candidates, but there are no restrictions on donations to political parties.

In addition to campaign reform, Reid said he would focus on health care, education and the environment, pushing a "mainstream agenda" among Democrats in the Senate.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, we veered off to the left," he said.

Ensign called a surprise news conference late Wednesday night to announce he was ready to concede as the last of the ballots were being recounted in Washoe County.

The second-term congressman, veterinarian and son of a casino operator likened the experience to a sports contest "when you give everything you can and lose in double overtime."

Reid, 59, predicted Nevada politics hasn't seen the last of Ensign, 40.

"He's a very, very good candidate... . I can certainly vouch for the fact you shouldn't underestimate him," the senator said.

Senate Democrats elected Reid minority whip last week - the second-ranking Democrat - as Ensign demanded the statewide recount.

Plagued by misprinted ballots and a series of computer crashes, his re-election to a third term wasn't sealed until early Thursday morning after a hand count of 96,000 ballots in Washoe County.

The recount of ballots in the other 16 counties in Nevada had dropped Reid's margin of victory statewide from 401 to 390.

But the final count announced in Washoe County on Thursday showed Reid with a net gain of 38 votes - Reid picking up six additional votes and Ensign losing 32 votes he had in the original tally.

That put Reid's final statewide margin of victory at 428.

Reid paid special thanks to Secretary of State Dean Heller, a Republican who was in charge of the recount.

"He deserves a medal for bipartisanship. They were trying to push him into being partisan and he refused to be partisan," Reid said.

Ensign said Wednesday night that both candidates had picked up hundreds of votes that had not been counted originally in Washoe County.

"They'd open up boxes and find ballots uncounted," Ensign said.

But the Washoe County numbers released Thursday didn't reflect such a wide variance in totals and Reid said he hadn't heard any reports of uncounted ballots.

In fact, it appears some ballots were counted twice during an earlier review of about 6,000 problem ballots in Washoe County, said Laura Dancer, county registrar of voters.

The final ballot total for the county dropped during the recount from 95,672 to 95,612. Dancer said she was a preparing a report to Heller to explain the discrepancy.

"I don't think anybody suspected fraud," Ensign said. "I think it was incompetency."

Ensign said he would not appeal the results to the U.S. Senate, which has the authority to decide the victor in contested races. His campaign footed the $59,000 bill for the recount statewide.