From the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Illinois race remains in limbo
By Kevin McDermott
POST-DISPATCH SPRINGFIELD BUREAU
11/14/2006

SPRINGFIELD, ILL. — A week after Election Day, one especially bitter Southern Illinois contest may not be over yet.

Republican leaders say they will decide in the next few days whether to seek a recount in their whisker-thin loss to state Rep. Kurt Granberg, D-Carlyle, who apparently hung onto his 107th-District seat by just 114 votes out of more than 33,000 cast.

House GOP leaders, who had viewed Granberg as vulnerable and made him their top target this year, say they will wait until a remaining cache of provisional ballots are counted before determining whether to pursue a recount on behalf of Republican challenger John Cavaletto.

"We'd like to see all the votes counted before deciding," said David Dring, spokesman for House Republican leader Tom Cross. Dring and others say the narrowness of the margin, about one-third of 1 percent, may cry out for a review.

"Nobody's claiming fraud. We're not going to go marching into the county clerk's office," said Dring, referring to Chicago's election-night showdown over allegations of fraud in the Cook County Board president's contest. "This is just about the right of voters to have their votes counted."

The race between Granberg and Cavaletto, a retired teacher from Salem, Ill., was the closest legislative contest in the state on Nov. 7, and among the most negative. Granberg, a longtime lawmaker and member of the Democratic leadership in the Legislature, was accused of spending too much time in Chicago and of taking positions to the left of his culturally conservative constituents on gay rights and other issues.

Dring said the closeness of the race shows Granberg has, in fact, lost the faith of his constituents. "In a year of a Democratic landslide, an incumbent Democrat gets 50 percent of the vote, at most?" he said.

But Democrats say Granberg's troubles are less about his real record than what Democratic Party spokesman Steve Brown called "the smear campaign the Republicans ran against him."

Cavaletto, backed by a massive money infusion from the House Republican leadership, put out campaign radio and television commercials charging Granberg with failing to reflect the values of his district. One TV spot, slamming Granberg for failing to support Internet filters in schools, showed an Internet predator typing on a computer amid sinister lights and music, as a narrator intones: "Kurt Granberg: He's dangerously out of touch."

For the GOP to seek a review of the outcome, the first step would normally be to file for a "discovery recount" with the counties encompassed by the district. In that process, the challenger can choose up to 25 percent of the precincts that voted, and ask to go through the voting machine records to look for any irregularities in the vote totals, the accompanying documentation or the machines themselves.