Salon answers its critics
We've uncovered GOP voter-suppression scandals since 2000, and we'll keep at it, but there's still no proof Republicans "stole" Ohio. Plus: A sample of the raging online debate.
By Joan Walsh
Read more: Joan Walsh, Opinion, voting problems
June 6, 2006 | Farhad Manjoo's article criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone piece "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" generated hundreds of letters, most of them critical, and hot debate in the blogosphere (with most but not all lefty voices raised to criticize Salon). You can read the letters to Salon here, and we've sampled some of the leading blog responses below. Kennedy himself has replied here, and you can read Manjoo's response as well. But with people denouncing Manjoo, and Salon, as pawns of Karl Rove, it's worth taking a minute to place this debate in its proper political context.
Salon has aggressively covered Republican efforts to suppress Democratic voter participation going back to December 2000, when we revealed how Florida's program to purge supposed felons and other people allegedly ineligible to vote prevented thousands of eligible voters, most of them African-American, from casting ballots -- just one example of the many GOP maneuvers that suppressed votes for Vice President Al Gore. (Writer Greg Palast brought us the story, and a team of Salon reporters contacted county election officials in Florida to report it out with him.) Just a few days later, we followed up with a feature on the Republican-connected firm that carried out the purge, ChoicePoint, along with a history of GOP efforts at voter suppression. (The storyline is old and simple and continues through today: Republicans tend to back efforts to aggressively "purge" voter rolls of those who've moved or who vote infrequently, while Democrats tend to oppose them, since they usually scrub low-income voters who move more, vote less, fail to work the system adequately and -- surprise -- happen to favor Democrats.) We've followed the story doggedly ever since.
In 2002, Manjoo expanded Salon's coverage of our flawed election system with a special focus on the problems with electronic voting, with a series we titled "Voting into the Void." He was among the first reporters to sound the alarm. He made it his beat. If you go to this directory page, you can trace the many stories he's written documenting potential problems with electronic voting, as well as more pedestrian ways American voters are potentially disenfranchised. He did an early interview with Bev Harris, who was among the first to document the security flaws with Diebold systems. He went to Georgia in the wake of claims that the GOP stole the governor's race and a Senate seat in 2002, believing there was a real possibility that could be true. He found plenty to worry about in that state's, and others', embrace of electronic voting systems, but he did not find evidence that Republicans stole either election.
He has approached his stories on the massive problems with voting in this country in the same way, with an open mind. He investigated the many different allegations used to charge that President Bush "stole" the state of Ohio in 2004 and found all of them wanting. But in every piece, including his Kennedy article, he's also made it plain that probably legal but unethical methods were used in Ohio and elsewhere to suppress voter turnout and discourage people from voting, and that those tactics are America's shame. It's clear, however, that a divide has opened on the left between those who want to label the 2004 election intentionally "stolen" by the GOP, and those who think unproven charges of theft -- and they remain unproven, even after Kennedy's ambitious piece -- undermine efforts to work on the very real, documented problems in our voting system. They include the lack of safeguards for electronic voting, the too-frequent disparities in resources between rich and poor (and white and nonwhite) precincts, and the ethically challenged behavior of too many voting officials, from the infamous Katherine Harris of Florida to Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio, to people whose names we don't know but who make decisions regularly that suppress voter participation.
Salon will continue to try to get to the bottom of charges of election theft in Ohio, but we don't think the available facts prove the election was stolen. We also think unproven claims of theft weaken Democrats' credibility and keep them from the work needed to build an electoral majority, as well as to reform the broken voting system that is at least one obstacle to that majority. While the blog posts below display a range of opinion about whether Kennedy or Manjoo makes the most effective case, they also show an increasing weariness of battles about the "theft" claim, when both sides agree there were serious problems in Ohio. As Chris Bowers of MyDD puts it, "Simply rehashing these old arguments is not going to get us very far in creating the sort of electoral reform we need ... From what I can tell, there are only two things that will allow us to move forward with unity and hope. First, we need a lot more on the ground activism to try and retake control of our electoral infrastructure. Second, we need a national agenda for election reform that people on all sides of this issue can get behind."
We couldn't agree more.
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There's wrong, and then there's less wrong
"The nub of the problem lies in understanding the role of the Kennedy article. Manjoo thinks that Kennedy must prove to a courtroom standard that Kerry would have won Ohio ... But this is a ridiculous standard. Kennedy is not in a position [to] depose witnesses nor sanction perjurers nor find people guilty and deprive them of property or liberty. He can only use his voice to try to urge a formal investigation, so that justice is done ... Kennedy may be wrong, but he's less wrong than Manjoo says."
Once just, always just?
"There is little question that there were horrendous problems just getting into the booths on Election Day. There was a huge upswell in voter registration among Democrats in the months leading up to the election, and machine allocations were not updated to reflect this. RFK Jr. asserts that Republicans deliberately engineered it. Manjoo's response - it was all innocent incompetence. ... Which seems to be saying that the un-biasing couldn't have been deliberate, because once upon a time it wasn't un-biased. Which seems to me a bit like saying that the Republicans couldn't have fixed the election, because once upon a time they didn't fix elections."
Next page: Inconceivable conspiracy, or Fox News-style gathering of the facts?
