Farhad Manjoo:
I appreciate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s response to my article, and I'd like to first note that I agree with him on one main point -- that we should urgently begin the work of honest election reform. We differ on how to go about that effort, however. Kennedy believes that any such reform effort must begin with an examination of whether Republicans stole the 2004 race. I disagree for many reasons, but mainly because the evidence that John Kerry actually won Ohio is so slight that any such effort is, in my view, doomed to failure -- and such a failure would damage the entire reform movement.
Kennedy says that I've made a "cottage industry" of attempts to debunk the concerns surrounding the 2004 election. But as my reporting history at Salon shows, I've been exploring the various threats to honest elections for several years, and I thoroughly covered the threats to the 2004 race. He's right that I've criticized some who've been quick to claim that the race was stolen. But this is not because I think elections in America are perfect -- in fact, just the opposite is the case.
We'll only improve the process if we begin by honestly reviewing the facts -- and once again, I've got to disagree with the ways in which Kennedy interprets some of the key sources he cites to arrive at his conclusions.
The exit polls
With regard to whether the exit polls showed John Kerry to be substantially ahead in key states, Kennedy is simply incorrect in stating that I'm relying on "corrected" exit poll data while he's looking at the true numbers. I was relying on the very same numbers he cites -- researcher Steven Freeman's exit poll data -- to show that John Kerry's lead was well within the margin of error in Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio (the four states in which the exits showed Kerry ahead that he eventually lost).
You can find the exit poll data that Freeman relies on in his first report on the election, located here: In Iowa, this exit polling data showed Kerry ahead by 50 percent to Bush's 48 percent; in Nevada, Kerry was ahead 49 to 48; in New Mexico, he led 50 to 47; and in Ohio, he was at 52 to 48. As the pollster Mark Blumenthal has pointed out, the margin of error in these states varied from 5 to 7 percentage points. In none of these states does Kerry's lead even come close to that level.
The long lines
To estimate the number of people who were disenfranchised due to long voting lines in Ohio, both Kennedy and I rely primarily on the Democratic National Committee's report on the election, available here. The DNC arrived at its figures through a poll -- it hired a research firm to survey 1,201 Ohioans in order to see how they'd fared on Election Day. The poll found that "two percent of voters who went to the polls on Election Day decided to leave their polling locations due to the long lines." (Page 20 of the PDF file.) The poll also found that among these 2 percent, "potential voters would have divided evenly between George Bush and John Kerry." The DNC report estimated that this portion of the electorate represented 129,543 votes.
Kennedy is right that in addition, the poll identified another set of voters who "did not go to the polls at all because they did not receive their absentee ballots, or had heard about long lines, registration challenges, and confusing polling sites." The report adds that "We do not know the voting preferences of these approximately 47,979 voters."
I think Kennedy makes two errors in interpreting this data. First, he adds up both these two categories to come up with a total of "more than 174,000 voters" who he says "showed up to vote on Election Day [and] were forced to leave without casting a ballot." Clearly, though, as the DNC report states, this second category of people "did not go to the polls," and they were concerned about one of many problems surrounding the election -- problems including, but not limited to, long lines. Therefore, it's just not correct to say that these voters went to the polls and were subsequently forced to leave because of long lines. (As Kennedy indicates, there is some internal inconsistency in the report, since the executive summary also adds up these two categories; it's only when you drill down beyond the summary into the meat of the 204-page report, as I did, that you find the real numbers.)
Kennedy's other error is to ignore the very same poll's second finding that voters who were forced to leave precincts due to long lines would have split evenly between Bush and Kerry. Kennedy says that he doesn't believe this figure because it's based on voters' self-reports months after the election. But, as I've indicated, the DNC's entire study on long voter lines is based on self-reporting months after the election (the poll was conducted from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2 in 2005). I can't see why he'd place his trust in these self-reports when looking at the number of voters he thinks were affected by long lines, but not when looking to see which voters (Kerry voters or Bush voters) were affected. Moreover, even if he had valid reasons for ignoring this second finding, he misled readers by failing to at least point out that the very same report he cited came to a conclusion very different from his own: "Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio."
The purported rural vote shift
In his Rolling Stone article, Kennedy suggested that it is extremely unusual for candidates seeking lower office to receive more votes than the presidential candidates of their own party, as occurred in 12 rural counties in Ohio in 2004 (there, Supreme Court candidate Ellen Connally outperformed Kerry). Kennedy quoted Rep. Dennis Kucinich to this effect: "Down-ticket candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that," he says. "That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?"
I think that Kennedy ought to have pointed out to readers that Kucinich wasn't correct; as I reported, down-ticket candidates do sometimes outperform presidential candidates in some places, and in fact this occurred in 2000, when both Tim Black and Alice Resnick received more votes than Al Gore in dozens of counties.
Kennedy now concedes that such things do happen, but he says that for reasons particular to the 2000 race, the Gore example doesn't count. We'll have to disagree on this one. Where Kennedy appears to see no possible explanation other than vote fraud for Connally's performance in these rural counties, I continue to believe that the fact that the Ohio ballot does not list Supreme Court candidates' party affiliations accounts for some large measure of what Kennedy calls the "Connally anomaly." It's quite possible that many voters -- including some Bush voters -- chose her without knowing anything about her liberal politics.
Dan Tokaji, an Ohio election-law expert whom Kennedy cites numerous times (favorably) in his article, echoed this sentiment on his blog: "Although I'm an Ohio voter, and was following the 2004 election pretty closely, I must confess that I didn't know [Connally] was 'gay-friendly' or black until reading Kennedy's article," he wrote. "These down-ballot contests simply don't receive a lot of media attention ... I did know that Connally was a Democrat, but other voters might not even have known that. Although judicial candidates in Ohio are typically endorsed by the parties, the offices are nominally nonpartisan and, under Ohio law, "[n]o name or designation of any political party" is supposed to appear by judicial candidates' names on the ballot. So inferring election fraud in 12 counties based on Connally's vote total is, in my view, quite a stretch."
The purged voters
Kennedy argues that voting rolls in key left-leaning cities were cleaned up arbitrarily before the election. I pointed out that this was done in accordance with the law. Kennedy says that even if it was lawful, the procedures were arbitrary and partisan.
But even if you give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt here, I just don't see how you can count these people into any estimate of "missing voters." According to Kennedy, of the 300,000 names that were purged from the rolls, 10 percent, or 30,000 people, would actually have voted. He says this is a conservative number. Perhaps. But it's also unsubstantiated; nobody can know whether or for whom those people, if indeed they were real people, would have voted.
The registration errors
Kennedy is still misinterpreting the Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition study, which he said concluded that "72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors."
But the report did not conclude that. As he notes, it stated: "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." As you'll notice, the report discusses votes that were "lost" and those that were put "at risk" of being lost -- and this second at-risk represented 30,000 of the 72,500 votes. Many of these people, as the report states, did indeed get to vote; they were not, as Kennedy argues, all disenfranchised.
Related Stories
Was the 2004 election stolen? No.
In Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argues that new evidence proves that Bush stole the election. But the evidence he cites isn't new and his argument is filled with distortions and blatant omissions.
06/03/06
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