Kerry wins, but Kucinich snags nine delegates.

Byline: David Steves and Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 5/21/04): A story on Page A1 Wednesday misstated the number of delegates Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich won in Tuesday's Oregon primary. He is expected to receive seven or eight delegates, according to Neel Pender, executive director of the Democratic Party of Oregon.

With a vast majority of the nation's Democratic delegates already pledged to Sen. John Kerry, the only suspense in Oregon's presidential primary involved the margin of Kerry's victory over his remaining mainstream rival, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Statewide, Kucinich was trailing with 16 percent of the vote, or enough to pick up nine of Oregon's Democratic delegates for the national nominating convention this summer in Boston. Kerry's dominating 81 percent will give him the remaining 49 Oregon delegates when his party convenes in his home state.

In a Lane County primary where the turnout approached 50 percent and the vote-counting went smoothly, Kucinich had 20 percent of the vote to Kerry's 78 percent, based on partial returns.

Kucinich's ability to capture a sizable chunk of Democratic votes in an already-decided nomination race resulted from his unorthodox decision to spend the past 30 days campaigning exclusively in Oregon. In contrast, Kerry made his first campaign stop in Oregon on Monday and Tuesday, with plans to return next Tuesday.

Hart Williams of Eugene, one of Kerry's earliest Lane County supporters, said his candidate's success in Oregon was never in doubt once he garnered landslide wins in the early primaries and caucuses.

"I don't think they made the trip to Portland because they were worried about the primary," Williams said.

Should Kucinich's distant second-place finish of 16 percent hold, it will only marginally add to the about three dozen delegates he'd previously won - a fraction of the more than 4,300 delegates headed for the Democratic National Conven- tion in July. Despite the monthlong campaigning binge, Kucinich's Oregon finish wasn't as strong as in March, when he won about 26 percent of the votes in the Hawaii and Alaska caucuses.

Leandra Bell-Matson, Kucinich's coordinator in Eugene, said Democratic voters' preoccupation with "electability" led them to support Kerry, even if they found more appeal in Kucinich's more liberal proposals for the environment, education, global trade and other issues.

"When people come from that place of fear, then your thinking is clouded," she said. "If you step out of that and really get a picture of how America can be, then that's where America's strength really is."

Annette Newingham, Lane County's chief deputy clerk, said she believes that Tuesday's turnout could break the 50 percent mark by the time all of the votes have been counted.

"It's hard to tell - I'm predicting between 49 and 50 percent because it's so close now," Newingham said. "By the time we finish processing the `problem' ballots and getting results back from the other counties where we share items on the ballot, we just might be over half."

The primary election went smoothly, considering county workers have little experience operating the new optical scan ballot system, Newingham said.

"In the first election that we used it, and there was only one issue on the ballot, we had used machines because the new ones we had ordered weren't here yet," she said. "This time we had all new ones, and it's like having a new car - there are always things that have to be tweaked before it works just right. But we had a technician here from the company, and everything went pretty well."

The election office also has several wandlike tools used to pre-scan ballots for problems. One of them failed, which also hampered the processing effort, she said. The human factor also played a role, with more people than usual waiting until the last minute to turn in their ballots, which put a bit of added pressure on election workers, Newingham said.

"There was more of an 8 o'clock rush than we usually have - I don't know why," she said. "That probably slowed us down a little bit, but we're happy with the way things went."