Ol' Dennis wants a recount:
Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who won less than 2 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, said Thursday he wants a recount to ensure that all ballots in his party's contest were counted. The Ohio congressman cited ''serious and credible reports, allegations and rumors'' about the integrity of Tuesday results.
Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said Kucinich is entitled to a statewide recount. But, under New Hampshire law, Kucinich will have to pay for it. Scanlan said he had ''every confidence'' the results are accurate.
I find it somewhat amusing that so many people are demanding the taxpayers of New Hampshire indulge their paranoia by paying for a recount. What I'm not seeing, however, is an effort to raise the money to pay for such a recount. It seems that no one wants to put their money where their mouth is. It's much easier to spread rumors and baseless allegations than it is to actually do something concrete about it.
Candidates who lose by 3 percentage or less are entitled to a recount for a $2,000 fee. Candidates who lose by more must pay for the full cost. Kucinich's campaign said it was sending the $2,000 fee to start the recount.
Apparently, Dennis doesn't know simple subtraction, since he lost by significantly more than three percentage points. But I do hope he antes up the rest of the recount fee. And I'd love to see the fraudsters raising the money to help Kucinich pay for this thing. I'm always much more impressed by action than talk. Furthermore, if the recount shows troubles with the vote counts, the state should reimburse Kucinich for the costs of the recount.
But if, as expected, the recount confirms the original results, might it be too much to ask that the fraudsters wait for real evidence before making wild, baseless accusations? As DHinMI wrote yesterday:
Many folks immediately suspect that any election results they found surprising—and whether they know enough about local and statewide voting patterns to be surprised is always a good question—are most easily explained by malfeasance by the Diebold corporation or exploitation of its machines. There are many problems for these folks who look for the most exotic (and maybe reassuring) explanation for an election result they don't like, but in this case, let's start out with a fairly basic one: voters in every town in New Hampshire cast their vote on a paper ballot, and in more than half of the towns in New Hampshire, the paper ballots are counted by hand.
Fewer than half the towns in New Hampshire tabulate votes with optical scanners. More than half the votes cast are counted by optical scanners, as most of the bigger cities and towns—including Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth, Concord, Claremont, Hanover, Keene and Plymouth—use the scanners. But more municipalities count by hand. And as someone relatively well-versed in the voting patterns of New Hampshire, let me tell you there appear to be no discrepancies in the Clinton/Obama/Edwards votes between the towns that tabulate votes by scanning and those that count by hand. Obama won many of the larger towns—Keene, Hanover, Concord, Portsmouth, Lebanon, Plymouth, Durham. Clinton won others—Manchester, Nashua, Berlin, Gorham, Claremont.
There are reasons this makes sense, as I explained in an analysis of the town-by-town results here. And where there was a strong regional pattern to the results—as in the Monadnock region and the Connecticut River Valley, where Obama did well, or in the bedroom communities of Boston, where Clinton did well—the pattern extended geographically, regardless of whether an individual town used electronic or hand tabulation.
Again, if the people making unsupported allegations want to pay for a recount, all the power to them. That's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. But ante up the cash. If they are so convinced that fraud exists, they can even justify the expense as an opportunity to have me and other skeptics in the reality based community eat some serious crow. But other than Kucinich putting a $2,000 down payment toward the cost of that recount, I haven't seen any efforts to raise that money.