GATE CITY -- By cheating, Charles Dougherty won the election but lost the trial.

The ex-mayor of Gate City was convicted Friday of 16 counts of vote fraud stemming from his 2004 re-election, which relied on a stealth electorate of absentee voters assembled through lies and deceit.

A Scott County jury that heard the case sentenced Dougherty to 32 days in jail and fined him $32,000.

Eight voters testified that Dougherty approached them in the weeks before the May 4, 2004, town elections with an offer: Vote for him by absentee ballot, and he would make false statements on election records explaining why they couldn't make it to the polls on Election Day.

The reasons varied -- it could be crippling arthritis for a healthy voter, an out-of-town trip that was never planned or a hospital stay that never happened -- but all of them were fabricated.

Absentee voters who were the subject of this week's trial would have swung an election that Dougherty won by just two votes. However, the fraud may have been far more pervasive; Dougherty, 55, still faces another 15 felonies related to the large number of absentee votes he claimed.

As the verdicts were read Friday afternoon, the mayoral candidate who lost to Dougherty watched from a courtroom bench.

"This is the first good cold chills I've had since this whole thing started," Mark Jenkins said.

Two years ago, Jenkins was ready to accept defeat. But that was before Dougherty, a jail guard, called him on election night and said they had both run clean campaigns -- a comment that Jenkins said made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

Jenkins, who was appointed mayor after successfully challenging the election in court, went on to become a whistle-blower on what he called a tradition of election fraud in far Southwest Virginia. If candidates are inclined to cheat, he said, they can approach elderly and unsophisticated voters alone and pressure them to vote by absentee ballot.

Since the abuses came to light in Gate City, a similar scandal has emerged in neighboring Wise County.

Special prosecutor Joel Branscom told the jury that the case came down to "what you're able to stomach in terms of corruption, as representatives of the community ... I would hope at this point you've had a bellyful."

A special prosecutor is a lawyer from outside the government area appointed to investigate a federal official for misconduct while in office.

Dougherty presented no defense. Through statements to the jury and questions to witnesses, defense attorney Carl McAfee implicated the Scott County voter registrar's office for approving the questionable absentee ballot applications.

McAfee threatened to call as a witness Willie Mae Kilgore, the county's longtime registrar, but never did.

Critics have said Kilgore uses her political connections -- her husband runs the local Republican Party, one of her sons is a state legislator and another is a former attorney general and gubernatorial candidate -- to favor her preferred candidates.

Dougherty was a frequent visitor to the registrar's office. In questions to Kilgore's sister, who used to work as a clerk in the office, Branscom wondered aloud why absentee ballot applications submitted by Dougherty were accepted despite some obvious flaws.

For example, one voter was said to be unable to vote because he was confined to the home with a bad heart, suffering from crippling arthritis -- and working a 13-hour shift at Food Lion on Election Day.

Because that voter was too ill to testify, two charges involving him were dismissed.

Branscom, the Botetourt County commonwealth's attorney who served as special prosecutor, did not ask for a jail sentence.

"I'm not from around here," he told the jury. "This is not my community. But I have complete faith that you will do what you think is right for your community."

More important than jail time, he said, was a conviction. If the jury were to condone Dougherty's behavior, Branscom told them, "You will be governed by the people who cheat the best."

Dougherty, who served as the town's mayor for six years, was allowed to remain free on bond pending a sentencing hearing. In his closing arguments to the jury, McAfee said much of the case against his client amounted to "fussing and fuming" over minor points. He also questioned why the trial was being covered by newspapers as far away as Roanoke and Richmond.

"For some reason or another, this is bigger news than what's going on in the Middle East, the way they've been covering it," McAfee said.

But at least in one respect, Branscom countered, there was some similarity between Scott County and Iraq: In both places, the dispute was over the right to a free vote.