BOB MOEN Associated Press Writer | Posted: Wednesday, November 8, 2006 12:00 am
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The race for Wyoming's lone U.S. House could be headed for an automatic recount.
The race remained too close to call Wednesday, although incumbent Republican Barbara Cubin said she was certain she'd beaten Democrat Gary Trauner - wasn't waiting for someone else to declare a winner.
"I'm calling it," Cubin said in an interview from her home shortly after midnight Tuesday. "I just feel really gratified that we're ahead, and I'm sure that we won the election."
Trauner, who was seeking to become the first Democrat since 1976 to win Wyoming's House seat, wasn't so sure and said the vote difference was so thin that it appeared an automatic recount would be triggered.
"I don't know if anyone on either side imagined this is where it would end up," Trauner said in a telephone interview shortly before midnight Tuesday.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, just 822 votes separated Cubin and Trauner. Cubin led with 91,828 votes, or 48.3 percent, to 91,006, or 47.9 percent, for Trauner. But it was unclear whether there were absentee ballots still uncounted, and a software problem was holding up the tally in those last five Carbon County precincts.
The problem prevented the county's polling places from sending their results electronically to the county clerk's office Tuesday night and ballots were driven to the county seat in Rawlins.
"Why this happened and what happened exactly, we're still waiting to hear," state Elections Director Peggy Nighswonger said.
The secretary of state's office expected to have hand-tallied figures from Carbon County around midmorning. That would determine whether the race was headed for an automatic recount.
Libertarian Thomas Rankin, who became an issue late in the race in a post-debate confrontation with Cubin, was a distant third with the remainder of the vote.
Wyoming state law requires an automatic recount if the margin is less than 1 percent of the leader's total. The 822 vote spread was within the automatic recount margin.
Cubin said she was confident that any recount would confirm her victory for a seventh term.
Trauner, whose only previous political experience was being elected to a local school board, said he had no expectations before Tuesday of how he would fare.
Democrats, believing they had a strong candidate in Trauner, targeted Cubin from the outset of the campaign, and Trauner proved to be an effective campaigner despite his lack of political experience.
But Cubin has proven to be a resilient candidate in past elections, fighting off previous Democratic challengers handily.
Trauner, who co-founded and later sold an Internet provider based in Jackson, worked hard on a door-to-door campaign - he says he knocked on more than 15,000 doors - and raised enough money to run a competitive race - something that previous Democratic challengers to Cubin had trouble doing.
Cubin didn't help her cause when she got into a confrontation with Rankin after a debate on Oct. 22.
But even before the incident, Cubin herself acknowledged in a fundraising letter that she was nervous about the race against Trauner despite Wyoming's better than two-to-one advantage in registered Republicans over Democrats.