Reid camp wary of fallout from vote recount

Cy Ryan and Jeff German

Monday, Nov. 9, 1998 | 10:52 a.m.

Washoe County election crews worked through the night hand counting nearly 6,000 defective absentee ballots leaving the re-election of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., hanging in the balance.

County Registrar Laura Dancer said she hopes to have the final certified results completed for a 5 p.m. court hearing today.

In unofficial statewide returns, Reid defeated Rep. John Ensign, R-Nev., by 459 votes. But a computer counting malfunction and faulty ballots in Washoe have cast doubt concerning the election results.

The Reid campaign today expressed concerns that Republicans in Washington may be trying to use the troubles in Reno to make a national issue out of the race as they did in Louisiana in 1996. The ultimate goal, Reid aides said, would be to contest the outcome in the U.S. Senate.

"They're setting it up to put the state of Nevada on trial," one Reid campaign aide said. "This couldn't come at a worse time when the state is facing increased scrutiny from the National Gambling Impact Study Commission and pressure from the victory of the Indian gaming initiative in California."

Another Reid aide said Washington Republicans also may be preparing to mount a " witch hunt" to "exact retribution" from organized labor, which played a key role in backing Reid's bid to get re-elected to a third term.

The National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, headed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is said to be behind the move to stir things up in Nevada. McConnell's top lawyer, Craig Engel, is in Reno.

"They may be trying to get their foot in the door in Reno to open up the whole campaign hoping to create a Pandora's box of horrors," the second Reid aide said.

McConnell's committee led an unsuccessful campaign to contest Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's narrow victory over her Republican opponent, Rep. Louis "Woody" Jenkins, in 1996. Landrieu won by 5,788 votes of about 2 million cast.

After a lengthy probe, the Senate last year failed to substantiate Republican claims of voter fraud in the race.

Reid strategists said any effort to contest the Nevada race in the Senate would be a long shot. Reid, who's eyeing the Democratic whip's post, has many friends in both parties. It takes a vote of 60 to approve a challenge. There are 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats in the Senate.

Ensign, meanwhile, is waiting for the results of the Washoe County recount and the certification of the election results in the rest of Nevada before deciding whether to push for a statewide recount in his race with Reid.

Steven T. Walther, a Reno lawyer and spokesman for Reid, said Sunday it was a good decision to recount the 5,895 ballots by hand to get an accurate tally. He added that these counts have never turned an election around in the past.

"This is the first real count, not a recount," Walther said.

Former Gov. Bob List, representing Ensign, said it was up to the Washoe County Accuracy Certification Board to decide how to handle the questionable ballots. He said he was disappointed the county officials would not release the tally on the votes the first time they were counted election night.

"The events are so bizarre," List said. "The county will want to look at a new voting system. Lots of counties (systems) in this state and other states are faster and more reliable."

In the first election tally, Ensign defeated Reid in Washoe County 46,232 to 44,070. Washoe County, however, didn't finish counting ballots until 10 a.m. Wednesday while all other counties completed their work by midnight Tuesday.

Then 15,000 to 16,000 votes -- or about 16 percent of the vote cast in Washoe County -- were questioned after about 10,000 were counted on machines, which delivered bogus results. The machines were fixed, and the 10,000 ballots were recounted.

Most of the election ballot paper used by Washoe County was produced by a private firm, but the questionable ballots were printed by Washoe County.

John Byerly of the certification board said there was a misalignment of the actual copy on the ballot form and there was inaccurate cutting along the edges of the ballots printed by the county.

The defective ballots were used in 4,847 mail-in votes; 960 votes from four precincts; and 135 early voting ballots.

These ballots, according to Dancer, were printed by the county to save money. All tests on the county-printed ballots were successful before the election.

When they were tallied late Saturday and Sunday, Byerly said the defective ballots spewed out votes "that moved around" while being counted so the hand-count was agreed upon.

Because of the discrepancies, county officials asked District Judge Janet Berry for permission to re-open the ballot count after the post-election testing failed. Berry agreed to unsealing the ballot boxes, allowing another count and then ordered county officials to report back to her late today.

The Washoe County Commission is scheduled to canvass the votes Tuesday afternoon and send them to Secretary of State Dean Heller.

Heller had advised Washoe County to treat the 5,942 votes as spoiled ballots and have the ballots duplicated so there could be a machine tally. But he said Washoe County's decision to hand count the ballots was a "viable alternative."

Once Heller's office receives the final tally from all the counties, the Nevada Supreme Court on Nov. 25 will canvass the votes to make the count official. The losing candidate then has three working days to ask for a recount.

In addition to the Reid-Ensign race, the re-election bid of state Sen. Lawrence Jacobsen, R-Minden, who defeated fellow Republican Donald Forrester by 454 votes, also is affected.

Supporters for Reid and Ensign were on hand during the night to monitor the vote count. The election crew was composed of three workers -- one calling out the name of the candidate chosen on the ballot, another marking down the tally and the third overseeing it to make sure there were no mistakes.

There would be no more than two members of one political party on the each counting board. These boards are not only counting the Reid-Ensign and the Jacobsen-Forrester races but all of the contests on the ballot.