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In this debate there are several things that we know for sure. First, the election was very close. Second, there were many discrepancies and "dirty tricks," especially in Ohio. However, this is really all that we can know for sure. It is possible that the true will of the voters in Ohio was for Kerry to win, but it is also possible that it was for Bush to win. Anyone who asserts that they know for sure one way or the other is not being intellectually honest. Manjoo does a fair job looking more closely at some of the claims in Kennedy's article, but he also fails, as many letters have pointed out, to consider all of the claims together and to entertain the hypothesis that Kerry might actually have been the voter's true choice. Manjoo interprets the supposed numbers of of votes lost or voters disenfranchised on the low side, Kennedy on the high. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, but we have no way of knowing where.
This debate tends to invoke strong emotions on both sides, and it tends to get ugly quickly due to the impossibility of reaching a verifiable answer to the question, what was the voter's true will in Ohio? Now, American history is filled with dirty elections. The reason for this is simply that there are huge incentives, especially in a Presidential election, to win and therefore to find ways to cheat. It is a failing of our winner-take-all system that a candidate representing a party that gets close to or even over fifty percent of the vote can get no executive power. We all know the irrational limits of the electoral system in the present day and many feel it should be abolished. I would argue further that a Parliamentary system would be more representative. Under such a system those disputed votes in Ohio would not decide the whole election and therefore be the sticking point for years to come in a debate with no clear answer. They would instead determine a tiny percentage of some party's total representation, in direct accordance with their size of the population.
