The GOP House in January 1997 didn’t want to touch the Dornan-Sanchez contest with a 10 foot pole. Ditto the equally fraudulent Jenkins-Landrieu Senate theft in Louisiana. I say where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and those districts need an extremely close scrutiny. Whether the GOP has the balls to do it, well, we know the answer to that...
In 1997, a House committee investigated the Dornan challenge for months, and permitted Dornan to lobby congressmen in the well of the House. The committee’s report said that X number of illegal votes were discovered, but since it was well below Sanchez’s official victory margin that it did not recommend Sanchez being excluded from the House. We can say that thousands of additional illegal votes were cast, but if we don’t have evidence we can’t expect the House to exclude Sanchez and either seat Dornan or state that a new election needs to be held. Same with the Landrieu-Jenkins race: we can say that Landrieu probably paid off black voters to go to the polls, or that votes were manufactured fraudulently, but without hard evidence (and, no, a statistical regression analysis doesn’t count) the Senate wasn’t going to overturn the official state certification.
BTW, I mispoke when I said that Speaker Howell’s cowardice kept VA from using more favorable Senate district lines in 2013. The special senate elections held in late 2013 (or maybe early 2014) would have been held under the old lines even had Howell allowed the Senate bill to be voted upon by the GOP House (where it would have passed and been signed by Gov. McDonnell), since they were for the remainder of the term fir senators elected in 2011 under the old lines; the new lines wouldn’t have been used until the quadrennial senate elections in 2015.