Posted on 11/07/2002 12:56:40 PM PST by jwalburg
Narrowly defeated Republican Senate candidate John Thune has postponed a decision about whether to call for a recount after unofficial vote returns showed him losing to incumbent Democrat Tim Johnson by less than two-fifths of a percentage point.
Thune, South Dakota's three-term congressman, said he will await the outcome of the official statewide vote canvass on Tuesday, Nov. 12, to see whether Johnson's 528-vote lead erodes.
"The numbers are in, and we came up a little bit short. I don't anticipate a change," Thune said when he addressed reporters early Wednesday afternoon. "We'll wait and see."
State law allows for a recount if the margin is within one-fourth of 1 percent. Thune would have until Friday, Nov. 15, to request a recount.
The final tally was 167,477 votes for Johnson and 166,949 for Thune. Libertarian Kurt Evans, who had dropped out of the race, drew 3,071 votes.
Thune, 41, and Johnson, 55, watched see-saw returns roll in throughout the night as counting was held up by equipment problems in two counties and other precincts simply took all or most of the night to count votes.
By 2 a.m., Thune held a fairly commanding lead of more than 3,000 votes.
By sunrise, Johnson had made up the ground and edged ahead.
"At about 3 in the morning, I went back and got about an hour's worth of sleep," Johnson said. "It was not looking as good as I would have liked. Our lead had completely eroded away. We also knew which precincts were left and knew John's lead wasn't insurmountable."
Johnson's wife, Barb, woke him to tell him the gap had narrowed to about 500 votes, he said. "I could see not much room for error," he said.
Counties have until Friday, Nov. 8, to tally each precinct total into a countywide total. Secretary of state officials will add county totals to arrive at an official statewide total Tuesday. Any recount would convene with a three-member recount board in each county on Monday, Nov. 25.
Although Thune said he doesn't expect things to change and won't pursue a formal recount unless "absolutely necessary," he stopped short of conceding the race and said he's keeping his options open.
"We're hoping for a math error," Thune said. "I can't say at this point I'm ruling out any option."
Thune called Johnson on Wednesday morning to congratulate him on his apparent victory.
"He said he did want to take a look at the canvass, and I respect that," Johnson said. "He has every right to do that. We agreed the likelihood of there being a 500-vote problem in a canvass isn't very high."
In addition to a recount, a variety of legal challenges are possible, although no specific situations were publicly in play by Wednesday afternoon. State law sets a Monday, Nov. 18, deadline for someone to legally contest the election results.
On Tuesday, the Todd County auditor asked a judge for an injunction to delay the counting of votes due to confusion over which hours the polls were to be open. However, the judge denied the request, and the votes were counted, Secretary of State-elect Chris Nelson said.
"End of story," Nelson said.
Nelson, the state's longtime elections supervisor, said he knew of no other reports of voting irregularities beyond a few unfounded rumors floating around Wednesday.
Democratic officials were aware of a few dozen voters from Pine Ridge who might have been denied the right to vote, but they ran out of time Tuesday to locate copies of the would-be voters' registration cards, a spokeswoman said.
It was the vote from Shannon County - where returns were completely unavailable until after 2 a.m. - that helped Johnson squeak through. Democrats launched massive voter-registration and get-out-the-vote efforts statewide and concentrated on South Dakota's Indian reservations, where voters lean heavily Democratic. On Tuesday, 2,856 Pine Ridge Indian Reservation voters in Shannon County, 92 percent, cast votes for Johnson.
"This was a major step forward for the native vote in this state. But when you win by 500 votes, everybody can take some credit for it," Johnson said. "We work every county in the state hard. We wrung every vote out that we could."
Thune, too, recognized the record level of campaign volunteers and high voter turnout.
"We saw literally thousands of people get involved in the political process that never have been involved before," Thune said.
Thune will decide next week whether any as-yet-unformed county recount boards get involved.
If a recount is requested, the presiding judges in South Dakota's seven state-court circuits would appoint a three-member recount board for each of the counties in their purview, Nelson said. Under state law, each board would consist of one Republican, one Democrat and an attorney belonging to the political party that carried that county in the 1998 governor's race.
The boards would convene Monday, Nov. 25, and have no deadline to complete their work. Board members would examine each ballot physically, looking for an official ballot stamp and any irregularities. State law spells out how to identify and handle various kinds of disputed ballots, he said. The law sets up a two-person resolution board to examine ballots that machines have trouble counting, he said.
The group would decide whether to count the ballots by hand or, in the case of optical-scan and punch-card ballots, by machine, Nelson said.
Work could take weeks in the state's largest counties, where only three people would do all the work. In Pennington County, 35,976 ballots were cast; in Minnehaha County, 65,538.
"Those folks will have a large job," Nelson said.
A recount for one of South Dakota's federal offices is not unprecedented. The three most recent examples each had a Democrat narrowly defeating a Republican.
In 1978, then-Congressman Tom Daschle defeated Leo Thorsness, ultimately by 139 votes, in the state's former first congressional district in eastern South Dakota. Daschle took his seat in the U.S. House while awaiting the results of the recount.
In 1962, Sen. George McGovern narrowly defeated Joe Bottum, and Bottum alleged voting irregularities. The Rapid City Journal quoted him as noting "registrations at the polls of persons not qualified to vote." Bottum referred to construction workers working at Ellsworth Air Force Base who did not meet the state's one-year residency requirement.
In that recount, hundreds of ballots ended up changing in both directions.
In 1937, Democrat Clair Roddewig defeated Republican Sterling Clark by 376 votes.
The libertarian votes are an issue of concern indeed because they represent a fundamentally irrational action that cost a Republican this seat. Be careful about bringing up that news around here though. You may find yourself surrounded by a small crowd of rabid libertarians, every one of them screaming down your throat about how Thune's narrow loss was the fault of everybody BUT them.
Sadly that appears to be the case. The losertarian response to this one has been generally self-contradictory so far. Mention that Thune lost by their vote margin and they'll likely respond by desparately trying to convince you that Thune lost due to everything BUT the libertarians. Seconds later you'll see the same losertarians declaring that maybe Thune would have won if he'd listen to their ideas, and citing his victory as a deserved consequence of not pandering to them - a virtual admission of exactly what they just claimed not to be the case. Some of these people are beyond help, and I say this as a libertarian-minded GOPer from the Ron Paul wing of the party.
Is Thune going to take that lying down? I certainly hope not.
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