Was the 2004 election stolen?

In another specious attack, Manjoo questions whether any of the more than 300,000 voters who were purged in advance of the 2004 election actually showed up at the polls. "It's impossible to know if those were even real people," he writes.

Farhad Manjoo, meet Barbara George. She was among the tens of thousands disenfranchised in this manner. "My God. We are sixty-six years old," she told the Toledo Blade at the time. "We registered when we first turned twenty-one. We have lived in this same house for forty-four years, and [now, because of the purge] I can't vote. It just seems ridiculous that you have to keep re-registering if you don't vote."

Mrs. George was among 28,000 voters who were purged from the voter rolls only a few months before the election in Lucas County. Why before and not after the election? That arbitrary decision was made by the Lucas County Board of Elections, a group so ethically challenged, the whole lot of them, Democrats and Republicans alike, were forced to resign following a state inquiry.

It is also arbitrary that the voter rolls were purged in some cities -- Toledo, Cleveland, Cincinnati -- but not others, notably Columbus. This disparate treatment raises serious equal-protection concerns under the Constitution. Indeed Ohio stands as a case study in how officials, acting under color of law, can deprive citizens of their constitutional rights.

As to estimating the number of these voters, I took a decidedly conservative approach. The experts we interviewed suggested that 10 percent of those purged were likely purged by mistake. That alone accounts for 30,000 voters disenfranchised. The actual total is in all likelihood higher.

Manjoo's misguided gotcha campaign continues throughout his piece. With regard to his claim that the exit poll numbers were within the margin of error, Manjoo is referring to the "corrected" numbers that Mitofsky retroactively weighted to more closely resemble the certified vote tallies. Freeman and other statisticians, mathematicians and social scientists disturbed by the poll numbers rely instead on Mitofsky's raw data. Those numbers, as I report, indicated that Kerry had an advantage outside the margin of error in Ohio, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. He also had advantages within the margin of error in two other states: Iowa and Colorado, which also went to Bush in the final results. It's hard to engage in an honest debate with someone who won't debate the same set of numbers.

With regards to the rural counties, Manjoo identifies two Democratic judges who outperformed Gore in the 2000 election. They are both red herrings. First, it is disingenuous to compare Gore's results in Ohio in 2000 to Kerry's in 2004. Gore did not contest Ohio. He crossed it off his list of winnable states nearly a month before the election, and stopped campaigning there. Kerry, by contrast, made Ohio the focus of his electoral effort and campaigned intensively in southwestern Ohio, including the final weekend of the campaign.

As for the first judge, Alice Resnick. She was a wildly popular incumbent, who, with bipartisan support, actually earned more votes than Gore statewide -- which tells you something about how little effort Gore put into contesting Ohio. The second judge, Tim Black, is a white man, a former Republican, and a legal luminary from Cincinnati. That he should enjoy a boost in support in the surrounding counties of southwest Ohio is not anomalous.

Contrast these figures to Judge Ellen Connally, an African-American woman who strongly supports both gay marriage and abortion rights. Here is the paradigmatic "activist judge" -- from the opposite corner of the state -- beating the pants off Kerry in rural southwest Ohio, and nowhere else.

The "Connally Anomaly" is not so easily dismissed. In particular because an analysis performed by the National Election Data Archive for Rolling Stone reveals that Connally's margin of loss to her opponent Thomas Moyer in these counties falls in line with statewide expectations. The anomalous skew, by contrast, is between Kerry and Bush's numbers.

Finally, Manjoo faults me for aggregating the voters that the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition determined were definitely disenfranchised and those who were likely disenfranchised. Once again, however, this analysis is not mine, but the Coalition's. The report clearly states: "The key point is that the sum of these avoidably lost votes or votes put at risk add up to 72,500 votes or about 1.3 percent (range 0.9-1.6 percent) of votes cast in a (2004) Presidential election decided by a difference of 2.1 percent of Ohio's votes." Further, the report repeatedly cautions that its estimates are "conservative" and that "our numbers probably understate the problem."

As does the 357,000 number that I arrived at. It does not account, for instance, for the untold thousands of voters disenfranchised by Kenneth Blackwell's absurd 80-pound paper-weight decision, the "ballot crawl" in Cuyahoga County that misallocated Kerry votes to obscure third-party candidates, the suppressive effects of the GOP's Jim Crow-style bully boy tactics or the party's campaign to disenfranchise 35,000 urban voters. The list, tragically, goes on and on.

Manjoo has made a cottage industry for himself in attempting to debunk concerns about the validity of the 2004 election. Given that he has staked his professional reputation on the thesis that Bush beat Kerry fair and square, it's unsurprising that he should be eager to attack my piece. But it is a shame that his faith in the election results has blinded him to the point that he can dismiss the widespread and uncontested evidence of vote suppression as nothing more than a "hit parade" of irrelevant facts and figures. He also remains strangely silent on the transparently crooked recount process, which has kept this debate alive by preventing us from knowing the actual outcome of the vote in Ohio.

Manjoo's outrage and professional energy would be better directed at those who mounted a concerted campaign to obstruct hundreds of thousands of American voters from going to the poll and having their vote counted in 2004. The nation still needs a thorough and honest exploration of what happened across the country, so we can begin the urgent work of instituting real reforms -- ensuring that such abuses do not continue to undermine democracy and cast doubt on the integrity of our entire electoral system.

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