Feinstein Sworn In as Rival Charges Fraud : Politics: A petition by defeated challenger Mike Huffington goes to a Senate committee for investigation.

As U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein was decorously sworn in Wednesday to serve a second term in the 104th Congress, her vanquished opponent was circulating the halls of the Senate, accusing Democrats of widespread voter fraud and calling for a new election this year.

Defeated candidate Mike Huffington, who gave up his congressional seat and spent $28 million of his own money on the campaign only to lose to Feinstein by 165,562 votes, filed a petition with the Senate on Wednesday alleging that “misconduct, irregularities and fraud in the California election system were so widespread that the true results of the election cannot be known.”

“If an election is worth winning, it’s worth stealing. We have people who registered after they died and then voted,” Huffington said as he strode the Senate’s subterranean corridors, handing out his petition to legislators on hand for the convening of the new Congress. “If the fraud is as bad as I think it is . . . a new election in 1995 would be conducted in a truly fair manner.”

Feinstein, who spent the day relishing the start of her first full term with receptions, a Mayflower Hotel lunch and a ceremonial swearing-in attended by Vice President Al Gore, dismissed Huffington’s document as “nothing more than 14 pages of sour grapes.”

“My preliminary reading of the petition shows it to be extraordinarily weak. Frankly, I would be embarrassed to present such a document to the United States Senate,” Feinstein said.

The petition was acknowledged by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) before Feinstein took the oath of office and referred to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee for investigation. If sufficient evidence is found to contest the balloting, the Senate could void the election by a simple majority vote, paving the way for a rematch.

Dole explained that the oath administered to Feinstein on Wednesday would be without prejudice, meaning that the Senate would retain authority to judge the validity of the election of any of its members. But the fact that Huffington had contested her victory neither separates her from her colleagues nor hamstrings her ability to perform her duties as senator, Dole said.

“In effect, we are all sworn in without prejudice,” Dole said. “All senators sworn in today are senators in every sense of the word.”

It remained to be seen how seriously Huffington’s claims would be taken by Feinstein’s colleagues in the Senate, which has considered innumerable contested elections in its history. According to the Senate Historical Office, legislators spent weeks debating the 1974 election of New Hampshire Democrat John Durkin, who won his race by a narrow margin. Durkin finally agreed to a new election, which he won.

“Certainly you will get divisions of opinion . . . but this is not going to be laughed away,” one Senate source said. “The Senate at least needs to take a look at this and try to deal with it in a bipartisan manner.”

Feinstein and her defenders note that the results of the race were not all that close by California standards. George Deukmejian, for example, was elected governor in 1982 by 93,345 votes and Republican Bill Jones became secretary of state Nov. 8 by fewer than 36,000 votes.

Huffington’s petition challenged “the basic integrity of our election system”--a system where, in most cases, Republicans prevailed.

“Michael Huffington is not important enough to the Republican Party for them to . . . invalidate the election won by a large margin,” Feinstein spokesman Bill Chandler said.

Huffington relied on the findings of the Orange County-based Voter Fraud Task Force, which sampled 84 of about 25,000 California precincts. The results were projected statewide, leading the group to conclude that 170,000 votes are probably fraudulent--about 5,000 more than Feinstein’s margin of victory.

According to Huffington, there were more ballots turned in at some precincts than there were people who signed in as having voted. The task force also contends that there were thousands of votes cast by dead people, including 17 in Fresno County, 30 in Orange County and 20 in Alameda County.

Although Huffington stopped short of accusing Feinstein of personally engineering voter fraud, he pointed the finger straight at the Democratic Party: “I think the Democratic Party had a lot to gain by doing this and I am not at all surprised to find more Democrats who are dead and voting. I have no idea if (Feinstein) knew, but I know a dead person can’t vote without somebody actively getting their ballot. Who did that?”

“That’s ridiculous,” countered Bob Mulholland, campaign adviser for the California Democratic Party. “This is just a guy who all his life has gotten everything handed to him on a silver platter and just can’t accept the fact that he lost.”