Was the 2004 election stolen?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Farhad Manjoo face off.

Read more: George W. Bush, Rolling Stone, Robert Kennedy, Opinion, John Kerry, Ohio, voting problems

AP Photo/Al Behrman

Jerry Collier, left, and Mike Tolbert, center, inspect ballots while conducting the official count Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004, at the Hamilton County Board of Elections in Cincinnati.

June 6, 2006 | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

It was good to see Farhad Manjoo weigh in on my article in Rolling Stone about the 2004 election. Unlike reporters in the mainstream media, Manjoo has displayed a willingness to actually read the published reports that document the electoral travesty that occurred in Ohio. It is a shame, however, that in his attempt to debunk my article, he commits precisely the sins of omission and distortion that he accuses me of having perpetrated.

The key example of this is Manjoo's flatly inaccurate claim that the Democratic National Committee report identifies only 129,543 voters, or 2 percent of the electorate, who were disenfranchised by the long lines in Ohio. I can only point to the executive summary of the DNC report, which states:

"Scarcity of voting machines caused long lines that deterred many people from voting. Three percent of voters who went to the polls left their polling places and did not return due to the long lines."

Manjoo seizes on one line in the 204-page report and then attempts to play a clumsy game of gotcha. But if he had read more carefully he would have understood that the 129,543 votes he refers to were only a subset of those disenfranchised by the long lines. Had Manjoo read a mere paragraph further in the report, he would have seen that it identifies a second group, comprising roughly 48,000 citizens, or 0.83 percent of Ohio's electorate, whose votes were also suppressed because of the lines and other factors.

The authors of the DNC report aggregate these totals to arrive at the 3 percent figure that I cited. Does Manjoo pretend to have a better grasp on the data than the DNC's own experts? If so, his beef is with them, not me.

Manjoo also raises the issue of voting preference identified in the DNC's report, insisting "that those votes would have split evenly between Kerry and Bush." But, again, the DNC only ventures an estimate for the subset of 129,543 voters, not the full 3 percent turned away by long lines, writing of the additional 0.83 percent, "We do not know the voting preferences of these approximately 47,979 voters."

I chose not to rely on this incomplete picture from the DNC. It was evidently informed by self-reports of voter preference by citizens surveyed months after the victor had already been determined -- a notoriously unreliable measure that routinely overstates the performance of the victor. Instead, I cite the lone report on the Ohio scandal that was produced by the federal government, the Conyers Report. It concludes that the majority disenfranchised by the lines were Democrats. That report -- along with every news report from Election Day -- identifies that the worst lines were in urban areas and on college campuses, Democratic strongholds both.

Contrary to Manjoo's insinuation, I never suggest that no Republicans were disenfranchised in 2004. Many thousands were doubtless caught up in the massive voter suppression effort. But they were also clearly in the minority. The most severely affected were urban dwellers, in particular black urban dwellers. Ohio's biggest cities voted for Kerry by margins approaching 5-to-1. Eighty-four percent of black voters voted for Kerry.

Next page: "Ohio stands as a case study in how officials, acting under color of law, can deprive citizens of their constitutional rights"