Huffington to Challenge New Feinstein Term : Politics: Defeated candidate plans to ask Vice President Gore to take allegations of voter fraud to the Senate floor. Seating of the incumbent, other winning senators is today.

Defeated Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Huffington will challenge the seating of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for a full six-year term today on a claim of massive voter fraud, Huffington associates said Tuesday.

Lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg said Huffington’s complaint, to be filed with Vice President Al Gore as president of the Senate, will keep Feinstein’s claim to the seat in legal doubt while the voter fraud allegations can be pursued.

Whatever winds up happening with the complaint, Feinstein will begin serving her new term today along with other senators elected Nov. 8 to the 104th Congress. But if it is approved, her opponents would gain time to document their allegations, said Ginsberg, a former attorney for the Republican National Committee.

The Voter Fraud Task Force claims were based on alleged irregularities from a sampling of 84 California precincts out of about 25,000 voting places on Nov. 8. The figures then were extrapolated mathematically to arrive at statewide figures, said task force chief Harold Ezell.

The results indicate that at least 170,000 “fraudulent votes” were cast, Ezell said.

The California secretary of state’s office certified Feinstein Dec. 14 as the winner by 165,562 votes, about 2% of the 8.5 million cast.

An official at the Sacramento office said Tuesday that no evidence of voter fraud has been presented.

A Feinstein spokesman derided Ezell’s fraud claim as “an outlandish episode of ‘The Twilight Zone.’ ”

Press Secretary Bill Chandler added: “This is both an unfair and wrong tactic to take to try to prevent Sen. Feinstein from serving in her duly elected post.”

Huffington, a one-term member of the House representing his adopted home of Santa Barbara, spent $28 million of his Texas-based personal fortune trying to unseat Feinstein in a bitter campaign. Huffington, in Washington on Tuesday night, could not be reached for comment, but released a brief prepared statement.

“What the Voter Fraud Task Force released . . . and what I will present to the Senate . . . is the beginning of an ongoing investigation that will not stop until the California electoral system is reformed,” Huffington said, referring to an act approved by the Democratic-dominated Congress in 1993 to relax voter registration rules.

Ginsberg said Gore’s office is expected to send the petition to the Senate floor, where the GOP will be in control. After brief discussion, the document was expected to be forwarded to the Rules and Administration Committee, Ginsberg said.

Chandler insisted, however, that Feinstein would be sworn in on the same basis as all other senators in November.

Huffington decided to act after reading a preliminary report of the ad hoc task force formed after the election by Ezell, a former federal immigration official and a leader of the Proposition 187 campaign to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants.

Ezell told a news conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday: “We have uncovered proof that massive voter fraud occurred in California’s most recent statewide election, on a scale large enough to have affected the outcome of several statewide and local races.”

But even if there were as many fraudulent votes as Ezell said, virtually every one would have to have been Feinstein’s to alter the outcome, Chandler said.

Ezell said the estimate was based on a sampling considered by the task force as representative of the statewide voting population. As evidence, the task force said more ballots had been cast than the number of signatures on voting rolls and that voters had signed rosters but failed to write in their addresses.

For example, Ezell said the lack of addresses amounted to about 3.5 votes in each precinct, “or as many as 85,000 if projected statewide.” But there was no evidence in the task force documents released Tuesday that such votes necessarily were illegal.

The task force also claimed that it discovered votes cast in the names of dead people in at least 67 cases--in Fresno, Alameda and Orange counties.

Ezell announced that the ad hoc committee was being disbanded but that the investigation would be pursued by a new group known as the Fair Elections Foundation.

The Huffington campaign had no formal link to the Voter Fraud Task Force, the group’s leaders have said, but it was supported financially by some of his supporters and contributors.

Times staff writer Faye Fiore in Washington contributed to this story.