On election night, McCloskey appeared to have won the seat, but errors in counting shifted the victory to McIntyre, who was then certified the winner by Indiana's secretary of state, a Republican.
On Jan. 3, the House split along party lines and voted not to seat McIntyre after questions were raised about the vote in Indiana. A state-supervised recount then gave McIntyre the victory by more than 400 votes, but Democrats charged that more than 4,800 ballots, many from predominantly black precincts, had been unfairly disallowed.
That led to creation of the House task force, which completed its work on April 18 in a fit of partisan anger over whether to count 32 unnotarized or unwitnessed absentee ballots.
When the Democrats on the task force decided not to count those votes, the result was 10 days of Republican rage described by House Majority Leader James C. Wright Jr. (D-Tex.) as "synthetic fury."
In two days of debate, Republicans charged that the Democrats had rigged the task force and its rules to ensure a Democratic victory and that the two Democrats on the task force had stopped counting votes once McCloskey was ahead. Republicans said the only solution was a special election.
"The task force simply found enough votes to elect its man McCloskey and then stopped counting," said Rep. Bill Frenzel (R-Minn.). "I believe McIntyre was beaten . . . by subjective judgments of McCloskey's Democratic cronies."
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