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• Saturday, June 3, 2006 11:50 AM

  The Real Question

  is Why can't we have fairer elections no matter who wins?

  See, if we get lost in this endless loop, we don't fix any of the real, objective problems, the partisan sec's of state, the hackable voting machines (note I didn't say "hacked" - oh, no, can't be accused of any CT's, can we?) without paper trails.

  And seriously, do we want to err on the side of "let's not look too tinfoily"? Or on the side of "geez, could be something to this, statisticians are skeptical, say, how 'bout let's look into this!"

  I mean, come on.

  The very fact that the recounts in Ohio were subverted (we have eye witnesses, don't need any expert statisticians) by non-random selection of count-matching precincts tells us there was never a complete accounting of what happened in Ohio.

  And absent this, all the wrangling and sniping over whose experts should be heeded will never conclude anything.

  We know thousands were unable to vote because there weren't enough machines, or they were illegally turned away when the polls closed, or they weren't given provisional ballots. We can't round those people up and find out what their votes would have been. We can't get the voice of the overseas Americans who never received their absentee ballots in time.

  But we can count the votes that were cast. We can look at the absentee ballots, the provisional ballots. We can compare hand counts to machine counts.

  We can take steps to ensure people like Blackwell don't get away with trying to discourage and disenfranchise voters.

  We can have a real investigation into what is on its face a terrible election, even not considering statistical analyses and all that blather.

  And why shouldn't we? I posit the question to Mr. Manjoo - why shouldn't we at least take a look at what happened, why shouldn't there be a serious bi-partisan investigation into what went wrong and how we can prevent ANYONE's vote from being lost, discouraged, miscounted, destroyed?

  Why not, Mr. Manjoo?

  If JFK Jr. made mistakes in his article (and I'm not conceding he did), at the very least it poses this question, and challenges this country to make good on its representations to the world about what we stand for and on its promise to us as its citizens.

  —delphine
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