Recount the Debate

The New Hampshire election wrap-up thread at Blue Oregon has devolved into a discussion of the allegations of voting fraud levelled by people who think that the fact that Barack Obama was predicted to win the Democratic primary by a good margin in the pre-election polling and ended up a couple of percentage points behind Hillary Clinton in the actual election means that there was some hanky-panky going on in the Diebold boxes.

Conspiracy theorists are calling for a recount, as is Dennis Kucinich, who’s doing it for — I think — a different reason, although I don’t have any inside info.

Kucinich was excluded from the ABC-sponsored New Hampshire debate on the Saturday before the election even though he scored higher than the included Bill Richardson in ABC’s own poll, because he didn’t make at least a fourth-place finish in Iowa or meet a minimum of 5% in a national poll. (He’s also been disinvited from the NBC debate on 15 January in Las Vegas less than two days after receiving a formal invite.)

Then, of couse, sometime in the three days between the debates and the election, everything changed. At least for Obama.

As for the recount, I doubt it would make a whit of difference. Kucinich himself says he has no expectation that a recount “will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf” but that it would help put the rumors to rest.

Now, I don’t work for the Kucinich campaign in any capacity (I suspect that I probably got more on unemployment than I could working for the campaign in any capacity) but I have a little theory about why Kucinich might be making this little stand on vote accountability.

I think he’s pretty sure Obama isn’t going to call for a recount. For one thing Obama has nothing real to gain from a recount since he got the same number of delegates in New Hampshire as Clinton, and the vote would have to be waaaay off in order to gain another convention delegate. Or lose a convention delegate if the count went the other way.

The thing is, if there’s no recount, there has to be an admission that the polls are inaccurate enough that three days before the election everyone assumed Obama was a sure winner even though he ended up in very close second.

I think what we’ll see from the Kucinich camp is a questioning of the method by which he was excluded form the final debate in the first primary state (where he had done a lot of campaigning), based as it was on polls that have now been proven fallible by the election. He won’t make the case that he would have been the winner, but he’ll probably ask whether the polls can accurately gauge his level of support and how that criteria can be used to exclude him from the debates if they can’t even get the winner correct. Arguably, being in the debate might have done something to his numbers in the election, either way.

At least, that’s how I’d frame the argument if it was me.