On Wednesday morning, when it became clear that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach could potentially control the whisker thin recount of his race for Kansas governor—a race in which Kobach currently holds a razor thin lead pending review and a possible recount—other Kansas officials were quick to say that Kobach would “do the right thing” and recuse himself. They said that Kobach would be “well advised to remove any appearance of impropriety” and that “fairness would dictate that Mr. Kobach personally recuse himself” and that both legal and ethical guidelines would lead Kobach to stepping back.
Which obviously proved that no other Kansan has have ever met Kris Kobach. Because the “voter fraud expert” who chaired Trump’s commission and loudly announced there were “three to five million” illegal votes out there based on zero evidence, is suddenly convinced that 191 votes is such a huge margin that there’s simply no point in even looking at it. As the Kansas City Star reports, Kobach is shocked, shocked, that his opponent would even consider such a thing.
“If the margin is less than 10 votes or something extraordinarily close, I would expect any person to call for a recount,” Kobach said. “A recount would take a significant amount of time to do a recount statewide. It also depends on what kind.”
Yeah. If the margin was just 0.003 percent, instead of an enormous 0.06 percent … then it might be worth a recount. It’s not like anyone ever overcame a 191 vote difference. Well, anyone other than Al Franken, who went to the Senate after a recount altered the vote total by 206 votes. Well, not anyone except Franken and Christine Gregoire, who took the governorship of Washington after a recount moved the vote by 262.
In fact, while 538 points out that recounts rarely affect the outcome of elections, in the 27 statewide recounts that took place between 2000 and 2016, the average change in the outcome was 219 votes. Which is, hmm, more than Kobach’s current edge in Kansas. So yes. Maybe this recount is worth doing, even if it takes a “significant amount of time.”