With all 610 precincts reporting and Scott Murphy leading by a scant 65 votes, the 20th District race is heading for overtime. Yet to be determined is how the 10,000 or so absentee ballots will break (when they are finally counted), what tally changes will be produced through recounts, and whether this all ends up in court. One candidate may yet emerge with a clear, if hardly overwhelming, margin.
Of course, the wrangling that will follow in the coming days and weeks (and maybe months) might only produce confusion and conflicting claims of victory. So it's probably worth taking note of how several similarly tight House races were ultimately resolved.
The most famous close House race came in 1984, when Frank McCloskey, a first-term Democrat from Indiana, seemed to lose his seat to challenger Rick McIntyre, who rode Ronald Reagan's re-election coat-tails to tiny 34-vote advantage after Election Night. A subsequent recount boosted his margin to over 400 votes. But McCloskey challenged the result, which was certified by Indiana's Republican secretary of state, after thousands of ballots were disqualified during the recount.
McCloskey made his case not to a court of law but to the House itself, which serves as the final judge of its own elections. And fortunately for McCloskey, his party enjoyed a robust majority in '84. At the Democratic leadership's command, the House took up the election and appointed a panel stacked in the Democrats' favor to conduct its own count – which, not at all surprisingly, determined that McCloskey had actually won the race by 34 votes. In a party-line vote, the House then voted to seat McCloskey, prompting Republicans to storm out of the chamber in protest.
McCloskey went on to win re-election four more times, finally losing in the 1994 G.O.P. revolution to John Hostettler.
That same '94 election actually produced an even closer House race, this time in Connecticut's Second District, which covers most of the eastern half of the state. There, Democrat Sam Gejdenson, a seven-term incumbent, was also caught up in the Republican revolution, emerging from election night with a mere two-vote lead over Republican state Senator Ed Munster. After a week of recounts, Gejdenson's final margin was certified at four votes.
Munster, like McCloskey, opted to appeal to the House – which, thanks to the '94 election, would now be controlled by the G.O.P. But Munster's case didn't rest on any claims of fraud; instead, he simply noted that each town applied its own standard in judging the admissibility of absentee ballots. He didn't get any help when Connecticut's Republican secretary of state, Pauline Kezer (who that fall had waged a quixotic and disastrous bid for the G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination and would who be out of politics by January) declared that the final count was fair.
Still, Republicans in the House were theoretically in position to do exactly as Democrats had ten years earlier and to invent some means of seating Munster. But their thirst for revenge was tempered by pragmatism. They'd spent years railing against the heavy-handedness of the Permanent Democratic Majority; how would it look if, in one of their first major actions after finally winning control of the House, they played the same game? Ultimately, the G.O.P. leadership determined that the appearance of magnanimity was preferable to evening the score from '84, and Gejdenson was seated, with Republicans telling anyone who would listen that they had shown more fairness than the Democrats had. (Munster's challenge was heard by a House committee, but it was quietly killed in a few months.)
Gejdenson hung on to his seat for three more terms, ultimately losing it to Republican Rob Simmons (who, having lost the seat in the 2006 Democratic landslide, is now running against Chris Dodd for the Senate).
The most recent contested House election came – where else? – in Florida's 13th District, in the 2006 race to succeed – who else? – Republican Katherine Harris. There, Republican Vern Buchanan claimed a lead of about 400 votes on Election Night, but it was soon revealed that there had been nearly 20,000 "undervotes" – ballots officially declared blank – in Sarasota County, where Jennings had outperformed Buchanan. Jennings decided to dispute the election; the implications was that the electronic voting machines that were used had somehow malfunctioned, costing her votes that might have swung the election.
With Democrats winning back the House in 2006, they could have opted to pull another McCloskey and to seat Jennings. But, like the new G.O.P. majority of '94, Nancy Pelosi and her fellow leaders recognized the terrible P.R. that would attend such a move. So did Jennings, who publicly declared that Buchanan should be seated so that the district would have a voice in Congress while she pursued her challenge – which ultimately failed to produce much compelling evidence and which Jennings finally dropped in late 2007, as she was gearing up for a 2008 rematch. The encore ended up being a rout, though, with Buchanan thumping Jennings last November.
