SourceRecount Fails to Overturn Va. GOP VictoryBy LARRY O'DELL, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 11 minutes agoRICHMOND, Va. - A recount Wednesday upheld Republican Bob McDonnell's narrow victory for attorney general in the closest statewide election in modern Virginia history.
Democrat Creigh Deeds demanded the recount after the State Board of Elections certified McDonnell the winner by just 323 votes out of more than 1.9 million cast in the Nov. 8 election — a margin of 0.0166 of a percentage point.
Deeds called McDonnell and congratulated him on the victory after preliminary recount results showed he could not overcome the margin. Deeds spokesman Mark Bergman said final numbers still were being tallied.
Totals from voting machines were rechecked in most of Virginia's 134 localities Tuesday. Results from each of the state's more than 2,500 precincts were sealed in envelopes, along with any challenged ballots, and delivered by state police to Richmond for a final tally and review by a three-judge panel.
The court ordered more rigorous hand counts in 10 precincts where problems with voting equipment were documented. A few thousand old-fashioned paper ballots statewide also had to be recounted manually, and punch-card ballots in one Virginia Beach precinct were rerun through a tabulator because a printout of the original results could not be read.
Virginia law allows a court-supervised recount when results fall within 1 percentage point. Taxpayers pick up the tab if the results are within one-half of 1 percentage point, although the campaigns must pay their lawyers and others helping them with the recount.
McDonnell, who has represented Virginia Beach in the House of Delegates for 14 years, appeared to win by about 3,000 votes on election night. But the margin narrowed as mistakes were found in the routine canvass of results by electoral boards in the days after the election.
Deeds, a state senator from rural Bath County, had pushed for the most intensive recount possible. However, the court rejected his request to rerun more than 500,000 optical scan ballots through vote tabulators.
In the only other statewide recount in modern Virginia history, Republican Marshall Coleman shaved only 113 votes from Democrat L. Douglas Wilder's 7,000-vote advantage in the 1989 governor's race.
