Republican John Robitaille, who lost by 13 votes in his bid to unseat Democratic state Rep. Amy G. Rice in House District 72, yesterday asked the state Board of Elections for a recount, saying he was particularly concerned that the vote in Middletown might have been counted inaccurately.

“This was a hard-fought campaign,” Robitaille said in a statement, “and those who were involved as campaign workers or as voters deserve to know that it was a fair contest in which all votes were counted and any possible fraudulent votes eliminated from consideration.”

Rice, a Portsmouth lawyer, received 3,266 votes to Robitaille’s 3,253 in balloting Tuesday.

The recount, in addition to machine and absentee ballots already cast, will review an unspecified number of provisional ballots filed in the district – which includes Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport – according to Robert Kando, executive director of the state Board of Elections.

Provisional ballots are those set aside for later consideration when voters say they believe they have a right to vote but their names or addresses do not match voter registration information.

Kando said yesterday that the provisional ballots for Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport have not yet been counted. He said Thursday is the earliest a recount might occur in that race.

Robitaille, a Portsmouth resident in his first try for public office, owns Perspective Communications in Middletown.

According to the application Robitaille submitted to the Board of Elections, “some scanners were not accepting ballots, and voters were advised to leave their ballots on top of the scanners to be read through later.”

The application also said “some polling precincts were shut down indefinitely while problems with the scanners were resolved, resulting in some voters leaving after they were advised they could not vote later.”

Moreover, he wrote, voters who cast their ballots later in the day reported lower vote totals than those who voted in the morning, suggesting that all of the ballots cast may not have been properly recorded.

Finally, Robitaille asked the Board of Elections to ensure that there were no votes recorded for any of the 76 deceased people still on the voter list for District 72, information that came from a Providence Journal article Thursday.

A Journal survey found there were nearly 5,000 such names on the rolls statewide, and the secretary of state’s office has initiated an effort to confirm the deaths and remove the names of deceased people from voter lists.

Gerald Kempen, town administrator in Middletown, yesterday acknowledged that some machines initially failed to read ballots Tuesday, but he said that election officials followed procedures specified by the Board of Elections to work around such malfunctions. He said he was confident the machine count was accurate.

When machines failed to scan ballots, the ballots were placed under the machines, he said. Once the machines were running again, the ballots were fed through all at once, Kempen said.

He said he could understand how people could get the wrong impression if they saw piles of ballots under the machines, or poll workers feeding large numbers of ballots into the scanners all at once.

In addition, Kempen said, he received an unfounded complaint that a pile of ballots was still on top of a voting machine the morning after the election. Those turned out to be sample ballots, not the real thing, he said.