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Dean seeks new election in Fla. race
2006-12-07
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean called for another election in the race to replace Rep. Katherine Harris, saying the declared Republican winner should not be sworn in until election questions are sorted out. "You cannot seat someone if you don't have an election that's valid," Dean said in a taped interview scheduled to air Sunday on a Tampa Bay-area news channel. The St. Petersburg Times reported the comments in its Thursday editions. Democrat Christine Jennings is contesting her loss to Republican Vern Buchanan and has sued for a new election. On Thursday, Jennings said she will ask the U.S. House to take the extreme measure of conducting its own investigation into the election. State officials certified Buchanan as the winner by just 369 votes. But Jennings claims that touch-screen voting machines in Sarasota County malfunctioned in the District 13 race and possibly cost her the election. More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters who marked other races didn't have a vote register in the House race, a rate much higher than in the rest of the district. "There are 18,000 people who may have voted, and we don't know what happened to their votes. You can bet that if the Republicans were 500 votes short they'd be calling for a new election, and they'd be right," Dean said. The state is conducting an audit of the Sarasota voting machines. Meanwhile, Buchanan has moved forward as the congressman-elect, arguing that recounts confirmed him the winner and that an initial testing of the machines hasn't produced evidence they malfunctioned. "We feel that Christine Jennings is putting her own interests above those of the 13th District," Buchanan spokeswoman Sally Tibbetts said. "It's unfortunate." But Jennings said: "If my opponent wants to represent this district, he should ... show concern for the voters and not the machines. We still don't know what went wrong." The Democratic National Committee did not return a phone message left Thursday by The Associated Press. The House plans to swear in Buchanan on Jan. 4 but could unseat him later, if it chose. Harris, a Republican congresswoman since 2002, ran for U.S. Senate this year but lost to Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. She came to national attention six years ago when, as Florida's secretary of state, she presided over the 2000 presidential election recount that gave George W. Bush the presidency.
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