Reno refuses to concede defeat in Florida fiasco

The latest electoral fiasco in Florida showed every sign of dragging on into next week when the former attorney general Janet Reno refused to concede defeat yesterday to her challenger for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Despite trailing by more than 8,000 votes in the provisional official count – just too wide a margin to trigger an automatic recount – Ms Reno said that she wanted a full investigation of alleged voting irregularities before bowing out of the race.

Her challenger, a Tampa lawyer called Bill McBride who has been embraced as the de facto winner by the Democratic Party hierarchy, declared victory late on Thursday, after the state's senior electoral official, Secretary of State Jim Smith, said he appeared to be the winner. Mr McBride waited most of the day for Ms Reno to concede but decided in the end he had waited long enough.

The continuing deadlock, reminiscent of the protracted struggle for the presidency between Al Gore and George Bush two years ago, risked drawing the Democrats into a damaging internecine battle rather than keeping the focus on unseating the incumbent, President Bush's brother Jeb.

The greater political risk, however, was to Governor Bush, who vowed two years ago to overhaul the state's electoral system and erase the nightmare of those contentious, nail-biting 36 days after the 2000 presidential election. However, the new touch-sensitive computers brought in – at enormous public cost – to replace punch-cards, butterfly ballots and the notorious hanging and dimpled chads, malfunctioned disastrously in Florida's two most populous counties, Miami-Dade and Broward.

Computers were not plugged in properly, poll workers were absent for long stretches of election day, votes were improperly tabulated and, in many cases, voting statistics spewing out of the machines seemed to be incorrect or downright suspect.

Ms Reno remained courteous towards her opponent in public and appeared at one stage on Thursday to be on the verge of giving up. But then a review of four of Miami-Dade's 81 disputed precincts turned up 1,818 uncounted votes. Since that part of southern Florida is Ms Reno's stronghold – she captured as much of 70 per cent of the vote there – she decided to wait a little longer.

"I think the Democratic Party is known as the party of the people, a party that wants its people's votes counted," she said. "We have experienced many questions about the electoral process. I think those questions must be answered."

Officially, the election results will not be certified until Tuesday. Legal intervention, should Ms Reno choose to take that route, could delay the outcome even longer.

Ms Reno, who was Bill Clinton's attorney general for eight years, was never an ideal candidate because she is a polarising figure considered too liberal for mainstream Florida voters. Name recognition alone made her the initial Democratic front-runner, but Mr McBride, a political neophyte, successfully argued he was more likely to unseat Governor Bush in November.

According to the provisional tally, the gap between them on Tuesday was about 0.6 per cent of the vote. Under Florida's electoral law, a margin of less than 0.5 per cent would trigger an automatic recount.

Ms Reno's best hope is to try to close the gap sufficiently to trigger a recount, then close the gap further when the ballots are re-examined. Alternatively, she might just milk the situation to create maximum embarrassment for Governor Bush, then bow out gracefully.