Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in the NY-23 election, appeared today on the Neil Cavuto show, where he kept the door open to challenging his narrow defeat by Democrat Bill Owens, who was sworn into office last week after Hoffman had conceded the race.
Hoffman said “I don’t think we’ll have an answer to this for at least a week or two,” and thats when the totals are completed, “each candidate will still have another week to protest.” He also said that with “20-20 hindsight,” he would not have conceded on Election Night. Hoffman’s concession allowed Owens to be sworn in quickly, even though the full vote-counting process was not completed — and in this same interview, Hoffman attacked Speaker Nancy Pelosi for swearing in Owens.
Adjustments to the vote totals — which came from a standard process of correcting human errors in election night spreadsheets — showed Owens’ lead shrinking from about 5,000 votes to 3,000, and spurring a a lot of talk in conservative media outlets about how Hoffman will be able to pull ahead from the several thousand absentee ballots yet to be counted. The math suggests that Hoffman is still highly unlikely to win, absent some other monumental error being discovered, because he would need to win the absentees by overwhelming margins.
