The Democratic candidate for county commissioner actually picked up votes in an election recount held last week.

After the recount, Joe Brenneman had 18,675 votes to Republican Denise Cofer's 18,540 votes.

Brenneman picked up eight votes in the recount, Cofer picked up four. The addition votes were due to voting errors - folks either used Xs or check marks instead of filling in the circle said county elections officer Dianne Murer.

Cofer and the Republican Central Committee asked for the recount, but the Committee anted up the cash to cover the expenses, which came to a little more than $1,900.

That rankled Republican County Commissioner Gary Hall.

"The Republican party should have had no part in the recount," Hall said Thursday. He said it should have been the responsibility of Cofer to fund the recount.

"For her to expect that was wrong," he said. "It's an individual responsibility."

Cofer said she felt a recount was warranted because of problems counting ballots on election night. Due to a programming error, the voting machines were only counting "yes" votes for Initiative I-147. It took several hours to fix the mistake.

"With the problems that were encountered, it seemed like the right thing to do," Cofer said.

The election, which put a Democrat in the county commissioner's office for the first time in eight years, seemed to split the Republican party.

But Cofer claimed that wasn't true.

"Friends don't let friends vote Democrat," she said.

She was also critical of a group calling itself Republican for the Flathead - which was made up of the losers of the Republican primary.

"Their male egos couldn't handle being beaten by a woman," she said. "What else could they do?"

She claimed they attacked her on several fronts, including being a woman and being a Christian.;

"Character assassination is their trademark," she claimed.

But the numbers in the election appear to show otherwise. The ballot, by in large, went Republican and conservative on many fronts in the county. President Bush, for example, won in a landslide here, while it was plainly evident that folks that voted for Bush clearly crossed party lines to vote for Brenneman, who was considered a moderate Democrat.