College professor Max Burns won a narrow unofficial victory over Barbara Dooley in Tuesday's 12th Congressional District Republican primary, setting up a recount.
Dooley's campaign now plans to contest the district's paper ballots, lever voting machines and punch-card ballots -- the source of Florida's infamous hanging, swinging and dimpled chads.
Georgia purchased touch-screen voting machines for $54 million, but the 12th District used its older methods because the secretary of state's office didn't have enough time to install all 19,015 machines across the state before the primary, said spokeswoman Kara Sinkule. They will be ready for the general election Nov. 5.
"We do need those modern voting machines, and it's high time," Dooley campaign manager Clint Murphy said. "Shame on our secretary of state for not having them in place by now."
During the 2000 presidential election, thousands of Florida ballots were submitted with misplaced chads, complicated the recount as President Bush won a razor-thin victory statewide.
With all 234 precincts reporting, Burns had 13,915 votes, or 50.5 percent, according to unofficial returns compiled by The Associated Press. Dooley had 13,641 votes, or 49.5 percent.
That's a difference of only 274 votes, and candidates are entitled to an automatic recount if the margin is less than 1 percent.
The results will not be official until later this week or next week, and the re-count would not start until after that.
Burns does not think the re-count will change the results.
"We learned a lesson in the last election cycle in Florida," Burns said. "I'm convinced and I'm confident that our poll workers did their jobs in a professional manner and there won't be any problems."
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