02/11/2008

By RACHEL LA CORTE  / Associated Press

The campaign of Republican Mike Huckabee called Monday for a vote-by-vote recount of the Washington state GOP presidential caucus results, saying they want another look at results that led the state party chairman to call the race for Arizona Sen. John McCain.

The former Arkansas governor's campaign argues that state party chairman Luke Esser prematurely called the race for McCain Saturday night after 87 percent of the vote was counted.

"It's a major exercise, but Luke Esser owes the people of Washington nothing less," Huckabee adviser Jim Pinkerton said Monday.

Esser said that he'd be happy to do a recount, but that all that would entail would be calling the county chairs and asking them to verify the numbers they've already reported.

"We're happy to do that," he said. But, "our focus right now is to get a count completed before thinking about a recount."

Esser said that additional results would come in late Monday afternoon. Early Sunday evening, Esser said that McCain's lead had narrowed, but only slightly. With just more than 93 percent of results in, Esser said McCain had 3,621 precinct delegates (25.4 percent) to Huckabee's 3,398 (23.8 percent) — a difference of 223 out of 14,253 elected at that point.

Late Saturday night, McCain had 3,468 precinct delegates to Huckabee's 3,226 — a difference of 242.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul won 21 percent of Washington's precinct delegates, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who dropped out of the race this past week, got 17 percent, according to the latest numbers from the GOP.

Pinkerton said he wants Esser to apologize and "acknowledge that he's done great harm to the Huckabee campaign and the Ron Paul campaign."

"Then we do the thorough, total, vote-by-vote recount and analysis of the situation," he said, arguing that Esser should reveal all his methodology and all his e-mail traffic "so all of us can judge the veracity of his statements."

Esser said the campaign hasn't yet provided him with any specific information about what they say are irregularities at the caucuses.

"I said I'd be happy to look into them," he said. "I'm not aware of anything I should apologize for."

Huckabee trails McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in the overall race for delegates, but has vowed to stay in the race until a candidate earns the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination.

Huckabee won all 36 national delegates at stake in Kansas and narrowly held on to win Louisiana's primary on Saturday, but fell short of 50 percent, the threshold needed to claim the 20 delegates that were available. Instead, they will be awarded at a state convention next weekend.

Washington state's Republicans have yet to allocate the 40 delegates it will send to the national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul from Sept. 1-4.

Washington is the only state where Republicans use both the primary and caucus results to allocate delegates. About half of the delegates will come from the presidential primary on Feb. 19, with the remainder coming from the caucus and convention process.

On the Democratic side, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama beat New York Sen. Hillary Clinton 2-to-1 in Saturday's caucuses.

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Washington State Republican Party: http://www.wsrp.org

Mike Huckabee: http://www.mikehuckabee.com/