Registrar: Reid’s victory to stand

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 1998 | 11:03 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- A recount by hand of nearly 6,000 faulty ballots in Washoe County was completed early today, and Voter Registrar Laura Dancer believes the narrow re-election victory of Sen. Harry Reid over Rep. John Ensign will stand.

After about 30 hours, the manual tally of the votes was completed at 2:30 a.m. Results will not be released until they are processed by a computer, which is expected to be finished by this afternoon.

In the recounting process, Dancer said there have been only "small errors and they were infrequent." The history of recounts in Washoe County has never changed an election result, Dancer said.

"We have not seen a significant problem," she said.

More than 200 county employees and volunteers worked on the recount. "It's tedious, labor-intensive work," Dancer said.

The Washoe County Commission meets at 3 p.m. to canvas the vote, and the registrar predicted the results would be ready by then.

Even though the hand tally was completed, Dancer said several more steps must be taken before the outcome is known. The computer must be tested and approved, a process that takes 2-3 hours. Then the ballot data must be entered by one staff person into a stand-alone, personal computer that will take 3-4 hours. Then the computer must be tested one last time, a process that takes 2-3 hours.

Dancer appeared Monday before District Judge Janet Berry, who signed the order Saturday to unseal the ballots to allow recounting. And the judge was worried the work would not be completed by the deadline of midnight today. "We're looking down a gun barrel," she said and then asked "Do we have the employees to get it done?"

Chief deputy District Attorney Maddy Shipman told the judge there's been a "ground swell of volunteers" to handle the job.

Reid defeated Ensign by 459 votes statewide. But Ensign had a 2,162 margin in Washoe County where Republicans outnumber Democrats.

The defective ballots, printed by Washoe County, were cut wrong, and it produced mostly errors on the right hand side of the ballot. That should add to Reid's comfort because the Senate race was on the left hand side of the ballot.

Steve Walther, the leader of the Reid forces, said he was glad to get Dancer's assurance that the vote count would be completed in time for the county commission to canvass it. And he was happy to hear Republicans saying they have not found anything wrong so far.

There's no evidence to date, Walther said that the GOP is trying to steal the election.

Steve Peek, attorney for Ensign, applauded the efforts of Dancer and said he does not believe there has been anything "untoward" in the election recount so far.

But Peek renewed his effort to gain the results of the first count in the faulty ballots. He suggested they be available to the public and the county commission when it canvasses the vote today. "It's important the county commission should have all the information. It should see the light of day," he said, referring to the initial count of the defective ballots.

But Judge Berry agreed with Shipman that these were unofficial ballots and should be sealed until there was an election contest. At this point there is no contest of election.

If the county commission is able to canvass the votes today as scheduled, they will then be sent to the office of Secretary of State Dean Heller where the Nevada Supreme Court will certify the statewide tally on Nov. 25. Ensign will have three working days after that in which to request recount.

If that fails to overturn the final count, Ensign could carry his contest to the U.S. Senate.

In all, there were 16,000 ballots to be recounted in Washoe. But 10,000 of them were tallied through the computer, and officials said there were no problems. But the nearly 6,000 ballots, when put through the computer, came up with different results.

There were errors in the printing in alignment of the actual copy on the ballot, and there was inaccurate cutting along the edges. Dancer said she used the county printing facilities for printing of some ballots to save money -- five cents a ballot. The rest of the ballots were printed by a private firm.

When the ballots were put through the computer the results were misread some times, but Dancer said this "occurred infrequently." The county, however, needs to certify the count is 100 percent correct.

Once the hand-count is completed, those results will be entered into the computer, and it will take two to three hours to re-run all the votes.

The votes in question were mail-in ballots and were used in four precincts, mostly in the north part of the county.

There's also a second race that hangs in the ballot -- the reelection of Sen. Lawrence Jacobsen of Minden against fellow Republican Donald Forrester who lost by 464 votes. Part of the district includes the south portion of Reno and Incline Village at Lake Tahoe.