Primary votes to be recounted
| LAUREN R. DORGAN Concord Monitor Saturday January 12, 2008 Votes cast in New Hampshire's Democratic and Republican presidential primaries will undergo a hand recount, after two candidates who garnered little support here questioned the results. The Democratic recount was requested by Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who won about 1 percent of the vote in Tuesday's primary. In a letter to Secretary of State Bill Gardner, Kucinich cited "unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots" and pointed to the divergence between opinion polls leading up to the primary - which showed Barack Obama ahead by a wide margin - and the final outcome. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the Democratic contest. On the Republican side, a Michigan chauffeur and little-known presidential candidate named Albert Howard joined forces with supporters of Rep. Ron Paul yesterday to request a full recount of the Republican ballots from Tuesday's primary. Howard is a 41-year-old father of eight from Ann Arbor who says he believes an angel of the Lord came to him and told him he would beat Clinton in a run for the presidency. He flew to New Hampshire on Thursday night and was at Gardner's office at 8:30 yesterday morning with the necessary paperwork. Now, Gardner said, the state is required to conduct a full hand recount of the nearly 240,000 ballots cast in Tuesday's Republican primary and the more than 285,000 ballots cast in the Democratic primary. By law, the recounts will start Wednesday. Because every ballot in the state must be recounted by hand, "we're talking days and probably weeks," said Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan. "We're very confident that the results that were reflected after the primary was over are going to be the results that would be the outcome of a recount," Scanlan said. The last time the state conducted a recount in the presidential primary it was 1980 at the request of perennial candidate Lyndon LaRouche, Gardner said. The recount gained LaRouche 11 votes, from a total of eight to 19. Under state law, if a candidate finishes more than 3 percentage points behind the winner, he or she must pay the cost of a recount. Kucinich representatives arrived at Gardner's office late yesterday - just in time to meet the deadline to request a recount - with the $2,000 fee required to initiate the process. They also agreed to pay for the full cost of the recount, Scanlan said.
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