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Durham DA race is hot

By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun, Nov 6, 2006 : 9:39 pm ET

DURHAM -- Voters are set to go to the polls today to settle a variety of state and local elections, none hotter than the race for district attorney in Durham County.

Incumbent DA Mike Nifong faces challenges from County Commissioner Lewis Cheek and write-in challenger Steve Monks.

Campaign workers for all three men spent Monday preparing for today's election, lining up precinct-watchers to greet voters and making sure prospective supporters understand the rules that will govern the balloting.

The candidates, meanwhile, traded barbs.

Cheek -- who has said he won't serve if elected, instead allowing Gov. Mike Easley to appoint a new prosecutor -- lent his voice to a so-called "robo-calling" effort that placed automated messages on voters' answering machines. His supporters also bought newspaper advertisements that said Nifong's handling of the Duke lacrosse case "embarrassed us all with his unprofessional and unethical behavior."

Monks was also active on the advertising front, saying in one that Nifong had contributed to Durham's image as a community that's "gang-ridden, crime-ridden, corrupt [and] controlled by a political elite." He maintained that Cheek's strategy would exacerbate matters by leaving the selection of the next DA up to the same governor who picked the incumbent.

Nifong fired back at the challengers with an e-mail to supporters that accused Cheek and Monks of running single-issue campaigns. "They have endeavored to make this election something it is not: a referendum on a single case that [they] view as a threat to their sense of entitlement and that they do not trust a jury of Durham citizens to decide," he said in the e-mail.

One key group of Cheek supporters, the Recall Nifong/Vote Cheek committee, planned to post volunteers at 20 to 25 of the county's 56 precincts. The group's leader, Beth Brewer, said pro-Cheek activists selected the precincts based on their size and the candidates voters in those precincts backed in the May primary.

Monks' campaign manager, Charlotte Woods, said her candidate is expecting volunteer help today from college Republicans from Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill and N.C. State University. She added that she'd fielded many phone inquiries from potential supporters who wanted to know how to cast write-in votes.

The Cheek campaign was also trying to make sure would-be supporters understood that the rules on straight-party voting allow them to cast such a ballot and also vote for Cheek in the DA's race.

County Board of Elections Director Mike Ashe said a vote cast for either Cheek or Monks would override the straight-ticket preference in that race alone and not affect a voter's choices in other races.

Ashe said 4,775 Durham voters have already cast ballots by visiting the Board of Elections during the one-stop voting period, which ended Saturday.

The one-stop turnout for today's general election was significantly higher than it was for the May primary, when 1,309 people cast ballots. Only 1,073 people cast one-stop votes in last year's City Council elections.

Ashe nonetheless wasn't taking the early count as a sign of things to come today. "We had better-than-expected turnout for the one-stop voting, but don't know if that translates to Tuesday or not," he said. "It's very hard to do comparisons election to election."

http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-785634.html