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.

RFK Jr.

Hit preview first, Delphine. Duh.

where the theft of the election has to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Nobody's trying to put John Kerry in the White House this summer. The stolen election CAN'T be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. There will never be a smoking gun with this story. But that doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed!

We have to look at the preponderance of the evidence, factor in that you have an extremely motivated group of suspects who have the means, access, and a history of ethically scandalous behavior... I'm not sure what else you need to be fairly sure that something awful went down in Ohio and other states as well. What is it about Karl Rove, Kenneth Blackwell, et al. that makes anyone think that they wouldn't do everything in their power--legal and illegal--to ensure Bush's victory? If nothing else, they were motivated to keep themselves out of jail!

Manjoo and other doubters remind me of the defiant OJ Simpson jurors who claimed that the prosecutors never proved his guilt to their satisfaction: maybe so, but that doesn't mean OJ didn't commit the crime.

Remember people: It's not illegal if the president does it and God told him to.

...elections in the US are local and are carried out locally. They are NOT conducted from above by sinister forces.

There are thousands and thousands of election precincts in this country. Elections in those precincts are monitored by local citizens in local parties, usually Democrats and Republicans. For widespread conspiracy to occur, you not only have to not only have the connivence of local Republicans, but also that of local Democrats. You are now talking about 100's of thousands of people involved in a deep conspiracy, many of them simply ordinary citizens who've volunteered their time for local democracy.

The problem is that we have so thoroughly demonized politics and democracy itself in this country that many of us are no longer able to trust our fellow citizens. (And this is true of both Democrats and Republicans.) We are so isolated and ignorant of local affairs (God knows that we can't trust our local tv news stations to actually cover our local news) that many of us are able to imagine all sorts of dire and stupid conspiracies that we would never dream of if we had any actual knowledge of the actual local people who run our elections.

In this country, election fraud has historically been committed in counties that were overwhelmingly for one party or the other: election fraud apparently did occur in heavily Democratic Chicago in 1960, but fraud also apparently occurred in majority Republican counties in rural Illinois as well. THAT'S why Nixon didn't contest the vote in 1960--the fraud pretty much balanced out.

As I stated earlier, we don't live in one party nation; we live in a divided nation, a 50/50 nation. Elections are hotly contested in places like Ohio and Florida; if real fraud occurred, it would be damn difficult to get away with it.

The real problem is that we simply don't have an accurate notion of how our own country and our own democracy works.

Thank you for responding to my critique, Mr. Manjoo. I appreciate that you took the time to participate in this discussion.

I must, however, disagree with your response to my initial point about Freeman's statistical anomaly (and your accusation that it is a straw man). You write:

"Right, Freeman's statistic points to *something* -- but everyone agrees it was *something*. Nobody is saying it was just chance. The argument is about which something it was: A polling error, or an error in the count? (And the number does not show that what happened was *deliberate* -- it shows that what happened was *systematic,* meaning essentially that it occurred in the same way in those three states.)"

Here, again, you are falsely framing the debate. You took my initial point -- that Freeman's statistic is meaningful, and not a straw man, because it shows the results in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could not have happened by chance -- and you derive a false conclusion from this: namely, that Freeman's number means either there was "a polling error, or an error in the count."

As in your article, your are using a semantic slight of hand to suggest the statistical impossibility of the exit polls being as wrong as they were in those three states had to be a result of one of two forms of "error". All Freeman is saying is that the results could not have happened naturally ("by chance"). You may interpret the alternative as "systematic," but that's not the only possibility. The other possiblity is a combination of deliberate fraud and other means of vote suppression.

My point is, you are saying Freeman's study proves definitively that we have only two choices to explain the results in these 3 states: polling error, or count error. But Freeman's study only proves that the results were not natural. You have made claims for his study that his study does not make.