WASHINGTON - Congress certified President Bush)'s re-election Thursday but only after Democrats forced a challenge to the quadrennial count of electoral votes for just the second time since 1877.

Bush's Election Day triumph over Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was never in doubt. After a near four-hour delay to consider and reject the dispute over voting in Ohio, lawmakers in joint session affirmed Bush's 286-251 electoral vote victory — plus a single vote that a "faithless" Kerry elector cast for his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

In a drama that was historic if not suspenseful, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., formally protested that the Ohio votes "were not, under all known circumstances, regularly given." That, by law, required the House and Senate to convene separately and hold separate debates on the Ohio irregularities.

Boxer, Tubbs Jones and several other Democrats, including many black lawmakers, hoped the showdown would underscore the missing voting machines, unusually long lines and other problems that plagued some Ohio districts, many in minority neighborhoods, on Nov. 2.

- posted by J Dub @ 4:33 PM