Farhad Manjoo makes a very sensible case against fraud charges as far as he goes, but he doesn't go far enough. He just doesn't take account of lots of the evidence.

1. Most important of all: there are 2 very big reasons to suspect fraud. First, the discrepancy between machine counted and hand counted ballots. I've seen two versions now so I'll present both of them; they tell the same story.

Machine scan:

Clinton 39.6 or 40.1%

Obama 36.3 or 35.8%

Hand count:

Obama 38.6 or 38.8%

Clinton 34.9 or 34.7%

But the second big reason to suspect fraud is that absolutely no one can explain the massive one-day swing from the NH polls to the announced results. Manjoo doesn't try to explain it, but hacking generating the discrepancy between optically scanned ballots and the counted ballots is the only explanation that makes much sense.

2. Manjoo discounts exit polls as evidence for fraud, but most experts take them more seriously than he does. I haven't seen any evidence supporting Chris Matthews' claim that "Obama was ahead in those polls by an average of 8 points". (Has anyone?) Manjoo cites ABC's David Merkle, who says the exit polls don't suggest fraud, but infuriatingly he doesn't give the numbers. If the raw unadjusted exit polls show even a small Obama edge, rather than the official Clinton margin of 39.0% to 36.4%, then believe me, they matter. Can Salon get those numbers?

3. Manjoo suggests fraudsters would have had to fan out all over the state to rig the machines. Not so. LHS Associates programs every single memory card used to machine-count ballots in New Hampshire. See the web page "Democracy for New Hampshire: Black Box Investigates" to begin to learn why that should send shivers down your back.

Conclusion: we need that recount. Thank you, Dennis Kucinich, for filing to get it. And we need it now -- not in weeks or months. Two reasons why:

1. It will tell us the real judgment made by NH voters: do they have a settled opinion on the best candidate, or do about 15% of them swing wildly from Obama to Clinton within a day or two?

2. Much more importantly, it will tell primary voters in other states whether the 2008 Clintonistas, like the 2000 Bushies, will stop at nothing to steal an election.

Stephen Voss

"Turks gone wild?" is an ignorant piece. The drift is evidently that under the current religious government, women's freedoms to dress as they wish are being restricted.

Not having been born in Turkey, my own drift will also be ignorant; still, my 15 years in Istanbul might lend some validity to a more nuanced perspective.

Every political party with any weight in this country is conservative. The 2 major parties resemble a Colonel Sanders chicken -- two right wings. AK Party, by far the largest, is conservative in a religious manner and is also widely suspected of being liked by George Bush. Bush would be lucky to win 5% of the vote if he were on the ballot here, but AK last year gained 47%. If democracy counts for anything, it ought to entail some respect for AK Party.

The BBC story regrettably doesn't tell us much about how the woman arrested for flimsy clothing was clad. My guess is that her dress was pretty daring or the wind that lifted it was pretty high. For all we know she'd have gotten a warning from a New York cop. You can see short skirts and plunging necklines in any neighborhood you choose in Istanbul. This city was cosmopolitan, after all, when Washington and New York were only gleams in the eyes of the Pilgrims. We're not talking about Iran, after all; there are hundreds of bars and clubs within walking distance of Galata Bridge.

The story gives no sense of the social and political currents now flowing through this country. CHP, the next largest party and the fierce opponent of AK Party, is on some counts more conservative than AK, but nonreligiously. It's CHP rather than AK Party that makes a point of restricting women's freedom to dress as they wish. CHP's policy is not to allow women who cover their heads to attend universities. So it is that women are used as tools in the power struggles taking place in Turkey.

If your sympathies are with democracy and left-of-center politics, you're likely to feel torn about AK Party, you're likely to find little to cheer you in CHP, and you're likely to look a long time to find any influential party to identify with. You probably won't choose an Islamicist hotel to stay in, but unlike this article's author you probably won't begrudge an owner the right to create such a hotel. You probably won't dress like certain serious Muslim women or again like their flirtaceous nightdress-clad opposite numbers, but you'll be inclined to cut both some slack since after all it's their own clothes ...

But perhaps it's best to let your British or American sympathies float a little free here, and be somewhat less prescriptive than you otherwise might. Otherwise, like me, you'll have a hard time appreciating the way issues of women's clothing are the tip of an iceberg that is now and will be well into the future buffetted by extremely complex currents. If you resolve to take this country on its own terms, and if you then look hard enough, you'll come to respect the unique way the people of this land are ever so slowly resolving fundamental issues of secularity, human rights, democracy, gender, and power.