Jackson Says Slow Count in Colo. Aided Foe

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, resurrecting the type of attacks on the Democratic Party’s nomination process that marked his 1984 White House bid, charged Tuesday that the slow reporting of results from Monday’s Colorado caucuses may have been designed to favor his rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Jackson based his charge on an assertion that early results reported Monday night, which showed Dukakis with a 6-point lead in the election of delegates, inaccurately reflected the full Colorado vote and could have skewed news reports in advance of Tues day’s Wisconsin primary. But, although Dukakis’ lead did shrink early Tuesday as Jackson’s supporters had predicted, later results from Denver and rural areas of the state had more than restored the margin.

With 77% of Colorado’s precincts reporting, Dukakis had won 4,029 county convention delegates, or 44.3%, to Jackson’s 3,528 delegates, or 36.5%. Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), who had the largest paid campaign staff in the state, nonetheless came in a distant fourth behind “uncommitted,” winning only 236 delegates, or 2.7%.

The county conventions are the first step in the process by which the state’s Democrats send 45 delegates to this summer’s national convention in Atlanta. If the caucus results hold up at congressional district and state conventions in the next few weeks, Dukakis would win 20 national convention delegates, Jackson would gain 17 and eight would be uncommitted, the Associated Press estimated.

Non-Binding Vote Closer

Partial results of a non-binding straw vote were closer than initial reports indicated Monday. The incomplete tally from about 70% of the caucus sites gave Dukakis a slim lead--44.6% to Jackson’s 43%.

In addition to his objections over the vote count, Jackson said his lawyers had protested about changes in the locations of the caucuses in 30 of the state’s 2,784 precincts and had complained that the use of private homes to hold caucuses introduced a cultural bias in the process that would weigh against many of his minority and blue-collar supporters.

Attacks on the nomination process were a controversial hallmark of Jackson’s 1984 White House bid. But until now, Jackson had steered clear of such tactics this time around. Tuesday, party leaders, hoping to calm the fight before it could take on the highly divisive tone of the 1984 battles, moved quickly to assure Jackson that they would guarantee a fair count of the vote.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. “wants to make sure the results are made available publicly as fast as possible. Everyone is entitled to know what the outcome is,” party press spokesman Mike McCurry said after Kirk contacted Colorado officials in an attempt to speed the count.

Events Held Outrageous

But neither the further vote counts nor Kirk’s intervention fully mollified Jackson or his aides. “The chain of events from yesterday to today is outrageous,” Jackson campaign manager Gerald F. Austin said late Tuesday. Jackson, he said, “reserves the right” to challenge the credentials of Colorado’s convention delegation if he determines that the election process was flawed.

And a clearly angered but restrained Jackson told reporters at a campaign stop in Arizona that, although the circumstances “heightened suspicions,” the apparent irregularities in the Colorado caucuses seemed to reflect “bad judgment” rather than deliberate fraud.

“Whatever the outcome is, that election has been marred by the long count, the moving of voting sites and a state chair using the state apparatus for a candidate in a tight race,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Jackson had called Colorado’s party chairman, Buie Seawell, a Dukakis supporter, “biased and politically unethical” because of the delay in fully reporting the caucus results. “If your count is slow, you can control the media, the flow of news,” Jackson said.

Jackson Assails Endorsement

Seawell’s endorsement of Dukakis was an inappropriate deviation from the chairman’s normal neutrality, and one that pointed to an anti-Jackson bias in the Colorado party’s electoral machinery, Jackson said, suggesting that Seawall should have stepped aside once he had endorsed a candidate.

“When the state chairman has already endorsed one of the candidates, and therefore turned the state party machinery and apparatus over to that candidate,” Jackson said, “that undermines credibility. It makes the process look to be less than just.”

“You cannot very well be a fair referee and coach another player.”

Seawell, however, strongly denied the suggestion that he had rigged the process to help Dukakis. “What Rev. Jackson wanted was to see that he had won, but he didn’t,” Seawell said. “The suggestion that numbers were held back is such hogwash.”

As for the endorsement, Seawell said: “I’m a political leader. I have stated in front of God and everybody else that the best way to beat George Bush is to nominate Dukakis. Is he (Jackson) saying he would prefer I keep that a secret, something to fool people about?”

“I have deliberately put myself under the hardest political scrutiny,” Seawell said. “I will be judged by what I’ve accomplished.”

Colorado party officials explained the movement of the 30 precinct caucus sites, all of them in private homes, by saying they needed to accommodate larger numbers of voters than initially expected. Jackson campaign officials, however, complained that they were not informed in time of where the new locations would be.

Researcher Dallas Jamison in Denver contributed to this story.