The chads are back to force recount in Dooley - Burns race in Athens

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Posted 3:44PM on Wednesday, August 21, 2002

A narrow unofficial victory for college professor Max Burns over Barbara Dooley in the 12th District Republican primary sets up a recount reminiscent of the 2000 presidential election, with hanging, swinging and dimpled chads - those little pieces of paper that don't fully detach from the ballot. With all 234 precincts reporting, Burns won 13,915 votes, or 50.5 percent, according to unofficial returns compiled by The Associated Press. Dooley, the wife of former University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley, had 13,641 votes, or 49.5 percent. That's a difference of only 274 votes, and candidates are entitled to an automatic recount if the margin is less than 1 percent. "We do need those modern voting machines, and it's high time," Dooley campaign manager Clint Murphy said. "Shame on our secretary of state for not having them in place by now." The new touch-screen voting machines were purchased for $54 million, but the secretary of state's office didn't have enough time to install all 19,015 of them across the state before the primary, said spokeswoman Kara Sinkule. They will be ready for the general election Nov. 5. In the meantime, Dooley's campaign plans to contest the antiquated voting methods - chad-producing punch cards that can cause voting inaccuracies, century-old lever machines or simple paper ballots. But Burns does not think the re-count will change the results. "We learned a lesson in the last election cycle in Florida," Burns said. "I'm convinced and I'm confident that our poll workers did their jobs in a professional manner and there won't be any problems." Most counties in the 12th District, which snakes from Savannah to Augusta to Athens, used lever voting, which is usually accurate as long as poll workers record every ballot, Sinkule said. Richmond County voters were the only ones to use a punch cards, and Taliaferro County had paper ballots. The results will not be official until later this week or next week, and the re-count would not start until after that. The secretary of state's office has a slightly different tally that gives Dooley 40 more votes, shrinking her margin of defeat to 234 votes. A re-count probably won't change the results unless severe voting irregularities are found, Sinkule said. "It's not uncommon for numbers to shift here or there. You generally don't see dozens of votes switching," she said.