According to the Columbus Dispatch, Republican Deborah Pryce's narrow victory continues to shrink.
Election officials declared her the winner by a 1,054-vote margin -- close enough to trigger an automatic recount. There's more...
By Robert Vitale and James Nash
The Columbus Dispatch
Monday, November 27, 2006
Republican Deborah Pryce was declared the winner this morning of a central Ohio congressional race that remained too close to call until 20 days after the Nov. 7 election.
The four-member Franklin County Board of Elections certified final vote totals that gave Pryce the victory over Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy by 1,054 votes, down by 2,482 from Pryce's unofficial election-night count.
The tighter margin is within the 0.5% required to trigger an automatic recount, director Matthew Damschroder said.
Pryce, who declared “semi-victory” hours after the polls closed, will return to Washington for an 8th term if the results hold. She said this morning that she was surprised the race came down to about 1,000 votes out of more than 200,000 cast -- giving her roughly 50.2% of the vote to Kilroy's 49.8% -- but doesn't expect a recount to change the outcome.
“We anticipated that the vote would narrow (after counting provisional ballots) but we didn't necessarily anticipate that it would narrow this much,” Pryce said.
As of noon today, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell had not ordered a recount, spokesman James Lee said. Blackwell's office is awaiting official numbers from the three counties that comprise the 15th Congressional District before calling for county boards of elections to conduct a new tally. They would have 10 days in which to do so.
Kilroy, who ran post-election TV ads urging provisional-ballot votes to contact their county boards of elections, did not concede defeat.
She said she wants the recount to move forward, and her campaign advisers indicated they'd take a close look at rejected provisional ballots, particularly those cast by registered voters outside their home precincts.
“This is the longest election night I've been through,” Kilroy said. “We are on to the next phase here.”
More than 19,500 provisional and last-minute absentee ballots that weren't counted for the race on Nov. 7 were added in during the official counts by Franklin, Madison and Union counties, which make up the 15th district.