Ohio Republican re-elected to House

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - Republican Rep. Deborah Pryce (news, bio, voting record) won re-election Monday by a margin so slim that a recount will be required.

Unofficial results announced by Franklin County, the last to finish counting absentee and provisional ballots in central Ohio's 15th District, showed Pryce led Democratic challenger Mary Jo Kilroy by 1,055 votes.

Pryce lost Franklin County, the district's most populous, but she retained her lead thanks to votes she picked up in two other counties that announced results last week, Madison and Union.

The race was one of a handful that had remained unresolved across the country since Election Day, when Democrats took control of Congress.

Pryce ended up with 50.2 percent of the vote, compared with 49.8 percent for Kilroy in the unofficial totals.

An automatic recount is triggered if the difference between the two candidates is less than one-half of one percent.

Pryce spokesman George Rasley was confident of the ultimate result despite the recount.

"We don't have any concerns at all that this is going to change significantly," he said.

Don McTigue, a lawyer for Kilroy, said the final numbers confirmed his own estimates. "I was hoping for just psychological reasons to be just under 1,000, but this is still under the free recount category so I'm very happy about that," he said.

The Franklin County elections board reviewed just under 21,000 provisional ballots, throwing out about 2,600 of them. Most of the uncounted provisionals were cast by people who weren't registered to vote or voted in the wrong precinct, elections director Matt Damschroder said.

Pryce, a seven-term incumbent and until recently the No. 4 Republican in Congress, had seen her lead in the campaign turn sharply amid the scandal over U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) and GOP leaders' handling of lurid messages he had been sending for years to male congressional pages. Pryce had publicly named Foley as one of her best friends in Washington.