WASHINGTON – As Congress formally certified President Bush’s re-election Thursday, rancorous political theater returned to the Capitol when two Democratic lawmakers halted the normally routine counting of Electoral College votes by objecting that Ohio’s pivotal election outcome was seriously flawed.

The futile challenge drew little support, not even from fellow Democrats. But it did give new Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the opportunity to take the Senate floor for the first time to affirm Bush’s victory even as he stressed the historical importance of taking challenges to voting rights seriously, a position echoing that of most Democrats.

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, D-Ohio, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., forced both chambers into debate over November’s presidential election midway through an otherwise perfunctory reading of the electoral votes from each state into the congressional record.

Under congressional rules, an objection by one member from the Senate and one from the House can stop the official certification of a presidential election, though that has happened only once in the past 128 years.

With Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., presiding over a joint session of both houses, Tubbs-Jones stood and objected when the moment came to record Ohio’s 20 votes for Bush in his overall 286-to-252 Electoral College vote win over challenger Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

While Cheney barely registered a reaction to the objection, leading Republicans lashed out at Democrats when the Senate and the House separated to their individual chambers for debate over the voting in Ohio.

“Their intention in this whole process is merely to sow doubt and undermine public confidence in the electoral process itself,” said Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio. The challenge is “no more than another exercise in their party’s primary strategy to obstruct, to divide and to destroy,” she declared.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, called the protest “a shame,” while a White House spokesman said it was time for the country to move on, not to “engage in conspiracy theories or partisan politics of this nature.”

Leading Democrats, meanwhile, seemed almost apologetic over the objection, but argued that the challenge was necessary to draw attention to voting irregularities in urban, primarily Democratic areas. Those problems haven’t been addressed since the election debacle of 2000, when the Supreme Court finally called Florida and the election for Bush, Democrats argued.

“Today’s electoral challenge is not intended to overturn the results of the election,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “It is instead to discuss the real problems with our electoral system and the failings of the process in Ohio and elsewhere.”

Pelosi did not encourage the challenge and Tubbs-Jones acted independently, Pelosi’s office said.

House members of the Congressional Black Caucus joined Tubbs-Jones in voting to sustain the objection, although Obama, the Senate’s sole African-American, voted against it.

Obama not only affirmed Bush’s victory but also restated his belief that the president received more votes in Ohio. The official count in Ohio showed Bush defeating Kerry by about 118,000 votes. Kerry, for his part, was traveling in Iraq Thursday and issued a statement that he had no intention of joining the election protest.

Obama said he spoke out because he is troubled that the country had not fully addressed electoral irregularities after the 2000 election.

“I think that it is unfortunate four years later that we continue to see circumstances in which people believed they had the right to vote, who show up at polls, still continue to confront the sort of problems … taking place not just in Ohio but in places across the country,” he said.

In the Senate, only Boxer voted to sustain the challenge and it lost 74-1, while the House voted 267-31 to reject the measure.

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The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who combed the halls of Congress throughout the morning encouraging members to support the challenge, called Kerry weak for failing to support the protest or otherwise carry on the electoral battle.

“Kerry surrendered too quickly and has not vigorously questioned this,” said Jackson, who excused Obama’s vote, saying he was simply following the marching orders of party leaders.

Despite their disappointment over the small number of members who joined the protest, Tubbs-Jones, Boxer and other challengers called the day a success, saying that they had shone a light on the need for national election reform.

Jackson also dismissed Republican charges that the protest was an exercise in demagoguery that actually harmed the electoral process.

“It has opened up for debate for the first time the flaws and fraud of Ohio,” he said.

The Associated Press reported that the last time the two chambers were forced to interrupt their joint vote-counting session and meet separately was in January 1969, when a North Carolina elector designated for Richard Nixon voted instead for independent George Wallace. Both chambers agreed to allow the vote for Wallace. The previous challenge was in 1877 during the disputed contest that Rutherford Hayes won over Samuel Tilden.

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(Chicago Tribune correspondent Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-01-06-05 2117EST