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Read other letters about this article
Many Democrats are furious about the 2000 election because Gore won the popular vote yet did not become president. Had there been a recount, I'm still not sure Gore would have won the state (since the election I've heard he would have won and he would have lost, so I'm going to leave that in the realm of the great unknowables of life). If Kerry had won in Ohio, Bush would have won the popular vote and Kerry would have won the electoral college. Gore voters, I include myself among these, though I voted for Nader (I lived in Idaho, talk about your vote not mattering) clung to this notion of the popular will being thwarted, and how awful that was, and how we should fix the system so this cannot happen again.
Would we have been so sympathetic in 2004 if Kerry won the electoral college? Would we still put so much emphasis on "the popular will"? Or would it have been "our due"? It seems as though this is what this is about. Manjoo is right, there isn't enough convincing evidence that Ohio was stolen (and Zogby can say it was the dirtiest election and still not have it be stolen). It doesn't, however, mean that it wasn't dirty. It just probably didn't rise to the level of being stolen. I think we would be less concerned about dirty elections in Ohio if Kerry had won.
BTW, many of the letter writers focus on the exit polls. Having a background in sociology and survey research, I can tell you that we aren't as good at surveys as the general public thinks. There are limits to what we can find out with surveys, especially exit polls in cloose elections. I would caution people to put less weight on exit polls. Its a shame that in the aftermath of the 2000 election there was a concerted effort to fix exit polling and little willingness to fix the voting system.
