Leading up to the Republican primary debate in Iowa hosted by This Week with George Stephanopolous, ABC was touting that American citizens could upload questions through its i-Caught web site that would then be presented to candidates during the broadcast. And whereas the YouTube questions posed to candidates in the CNN debates were chosen by producers, ABC suggested that the questions on the site with the best rating from users would be selected.

Turns out that wasn’t the case. First, of the only 27 questions submitted, only two were chosen. And those two were not the top-ranked videos by any means, as Michelle of Newbievids points out in her YouTube video above. Zennie Abraham, who’s question was featured on YouTube and then aired in the CNN debate, accuses ABC of fraud. “This has the fingerprints of New York old media-decision making all over it,” he declares, after suggesting maybe they should have asked vlogger veteran Amanda Congdon for a few pointers.

Abraham went on to post another video that lambasts ABC for how difficult it is to use the i-Caught site to upload and rank videos, which might help to explain why there were so few entries. He also posted the form emails ABC sent him as an entrant on DailyKos. There’s nothing in the language that makes any promises about the decision-making process, but needless to say, vloggers are feeling burned.

In another interesting twist, Ron Paul supporters are accusing ABC of fixing the results of their viewer opinion poll online, and even massaging the discussion in the forums. While these accusations can’t necessarily be proven, in light of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani’s ambivalence towards attending the upcoming debate on CNN, there’s a valid concern that ABC — which sells advertising time to candidates and has a stake in ratings for their political programming — has a financial interest in better funded and better known candidates being seen favorably in the wake of the debate. Especially online, where Ron Paul is doing significantly better than frontrunners like Giuliani, Romney and John McCain.

ABC is now taking questions for the Democratic debate, which will be held in the same format. As of this post, there are only a handful of videos uploaded by users, some the same questions from the last debate. CNN, meanwhile, chose YouTube to host and manage submissions, and selected 39 questions from thousands submitted by YouTube users. Over 1,000 have already been submitted for the upcoming date with Republican candidates.

Michelle ended her video by calling on the candidates to answer the questions by simply doing it online. Abraham wants vloggers to boycott the upcoming debate for Democrats. Ahead of the debut tonight at 10 p.m. of the show i-Caught, which will feature newsy videos submitted through the site, this probably wasn’t the kind of publicity among the video creator community that ABC had in mind.