Was the 2004 election stolen? No.

Claim: Republican officials deliberately rigged voting procedures to create the long voting lines seen in Kerry strongholds.

Kennedy says that "more than 174,000 voters" in Ohio did not cast a ballot due to long lines at the polls. He considers the GOP directly responsible for this failure. "The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts," he says. He says that Republicans in the state legislature pushed county election boards to reduce the number of their voting precincts, and that Republicans also failed to "distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts."

As one example, Kennedy cites the case of Matt Damschroder, who was chair of both the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus. Instead of buying equipment to deal with an influx of new voters, "Damschroder decided to 'make do' with 2,741 machines," Kennedy writes. "And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines."

Kennedy says that these allocations harmed Kerry voters more than Bush voters. "The result was utterly predictable," he writes. "According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes. 'The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans,' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus."

Reality: Kennedy is right to highlight the problem of long lines; every single study of the Ohio race done so far has fingered this problem as by far the single biggest cause of disenfranchisement. And he's right, too, that the problem affected minorities disproportionately. Many, though not all, political scientists who've looked at the question agree that the voters who were turned away would have broken toward Kerry. But the relevant question is how many voters didn't get to vote due to long lines, and who is to blame?

For his numbers, Kennedy cites the Democratic Party's comprehensive report on the question, so it's difficult to see where he comes up with the idea that "more than 174,000 voters" were turned away from the polls due to long lines. In fact, the DNC report -- here is the enormous PDF -- says "two percent of voters who went to the polls on Election Day decided to leave their polling locations due to the long lines. This resulted in approximately 129,543 lost votes." The report adds that "these potential voters would have divided evenly between George Bush and John Kerry." But even if Kerry got two-thirds of those ballots -- a huge margin, matching what he got in Ohio's bluest counties -- he'd have won about 86,000 more votes, while Bush would have won 43,000 more. This would have reduced the final 118,000-margin in Ohio to about 75,000 -- that is, Bush would still have been comfortably in the lead.

As to Kennedy's argument that Republicans deliberately engineered the long lines, he's on pretty shaky ground. To be sure, there is ample evidence that election officials throughout the state failed to respond to the surge in voter registration seen in the 2004 race. But it is far more accurate to see their actions as part of a larger picture of incompetence in the midst of massive changes in election procedures -- especially changes in voting technology -- than as part of a GOP plot. Kennedy elides the fact that in Ohio, decisions about voting-machine allocation and precinct location are determined by local boards of elections, which are bipartisan; any Republican effort to allocate machines in a way meant to harm Democrats would have necessarily involved Democratic officials.

The case of Matt Damschroder, the Republican chair of elections in Franklin County whom Kennedy cites, is instructive. As Cornell's Walter Mebane determined, Franklin County's allocation of voting machines was clearly biased against African-Americans. But Mebane's report (PDF) contains some important caveats. Franklin County's allocation of voting machines can be seen as biased if you look at the number of black voters who were registered by Election Day, but decisions about how to allocate voting machines are made months before then. That's why Mebane also notes that "if the allocation of voting machines is compared to information about the size of the active electorate that was available to Franklin County election officials at the end of April, 2004, then the allocation of machines is not biased against voters who were active at that time in precincts having high proportions of African Americans."

The difference reflects the reality that in the last few months of election season, registration surged in Ohio. That Franklin County's voting-machine allocation was considered unbiased in the spring and biased in the fall arises from the fact that the county failed to respond to these electoral changes.

Mebane doesn't let Damschroder off the hook. He says county officials "ignored information during the late summer and fall that should have showed them that the November electorate would be substantially larger. Between April and November, the active voter population in the county increased by more than 15 percent. If nothing else, the surge of new registrants should have indicated that their plans made in mid-summer would prove woefully insufficient."

But the fact that the county once had an unbiased distribution of voting machines would seem to clear them of the kind of deliberate vote-rigging that Kennedy sees. You can call them incompetent for not responding to new registration in the county. But can you really call them election thieves?

Listen to the chairman of the board of Franklin's election office, an African-American man named William Anthony, who also headed the county's Democratic Party. As I first pointed out in my review of "Fooled Again," any effort to deliberately skew the vote toward Bush in Franklin would have had to involve Anthony -- and he has rejected the charge that he'd do such a thing. "I am a black man. Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?" Anthony told the Columbus Dispatch. "I've fought my whole life for people's right to vote."

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