A recount of the votes in New Jersey's 12th Congressional District began yesterday after a tally Wednesday indicated that Democratic Rep. Rush Holt was the winner over Republican Dick Zimmer by a margin of 653 votes.
The Zimmer campaign demanded the district-wide recount last Tuesday to ensure the accuracy of the results, Zimmer campaign manager John Holub said yesterday.
The final results certified last week showed 146,165 votes for Holt and 145,512 votes for Zimmer, making the hotly contested race one of the closest in the country.
"During the course of the last two weeks, the vote totals were varying daily and we just want to make sure that this is a fair count," Holub said.
The recount commenced yesterday in Hunterdon and Monmouth counties by order of a Somerset County Superior Court judge and will continue today in Mercer, Middlesex and Somerset counties.
Officials hope to complete the process by Friday, County Super-intendent of Elections Dulcy Ricciani said yesterday.
The first step of the recount is to check the voting machines to ensure the machine readouts correspond to the numbers of votes reported by the five county clerks in the 12th District, according to Chair of the Mercer County Board of Elections Dominic Magnolo.
The next step will be to conduct a hand recount of absentee ballots and provisional ballots, which are used at the polling places for voters who have moved within a county after the registration deadline.
Magnolo said, however, the recounting process could end after the 175 voting machines in question are checked.
"Usually the campaign waits to see if they've made up any ground [with the rechecking of the voting machine reports] before calling for a [hand] recount," he explained.
As a result, if the Zimmer campaign has not picked up a significant number of votes through the machine check, it may drop the request for further hand vote verification and concede the race.
Holt campaign officials said they respect Zimmer's request for a recount but do not expect the recount to overturn the results of the election.
"Recounts aren't too uncommon, but they rarely overturn an election — especially with a margin of 650 votes," Holt press secretary Peter Yaeger said yesterday. "We wouldn't expect anything to change."
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