Dissecting the data regarding the 2004 election in Ohio is a laborious and difficult task. It is easy to get mired in statistics and counter arguments and lose sight of the most important point: whether or not fraud was committed, massive irregularities were reported and thousands of people were disenfranchised.

Whether or not these irregularities were deliberate, they must be investigated and measures instituted such that these problems are less likeley to occur in the future. It is essential to the fabric of our democracy that everyone eligible citizen who wishes to vote is able to do so without hindrance and that their vote is counted accurately.

Without an eyewitness or a smoking gun, it is not possible to prove that the election was stolen. Every article Manjoo has written on that subject seems to demand a non-existent smoking gun. He misses the point that there needs to be an investigation into these election irregularities. The sooner the better. And, intentional or not, the nightmare of Ohio 2004 must never be repeated.

Meanwhile, even as Manjoo discounts the evidence presented in Kennedy's article his own conclusions are less than airtight. For example, Manjoo claims that:

Scrubbing the voting rolls of people who hadn't voted in prior elections isn't an arbitrary move. It's the law. Here's the relevant section of the Ohio code, 3503.19, which states that a person who "fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal elections" shall have his registration "canceled."

Following the link that Manjoo provided, here is the complete section from the Ohio code (emphasis added):

The registration of any elector identified as having changed his voting residence to a location outside his current county of registration shall not be canceled unless the registrant is sent a confirmation notice on a form prescribed by the secretary of state and the registrant fails to respond to the confirmation notice or otherwise update his registration and fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal elections subsequent to the mailing of the confirmation notice.

In the section that Manjoo left out of his article it is quite clear that not voting in two prior elections is not sufficient to remove a voter from the rolls. A confirmation notice must also be sent. If voters were purged in Ohio simply for failing to vote in two prior elections, that would indeed be in violation of the law, just as Kennedy indicated.

Manjoo has written extensively on this subject for Salon, always reiterating his arguments and coming to the same conclusion. I implore Salon to assign another journalist to this topic to take a fresh look.

And I want to remind everyone that the 2004 debacle indicates that all is not well with our election process. Regardless of whether the cause was fraud or incompetence, we must change the process so that these irregularities are less likely to occur in the future.

This rebuttal to Kennedys article is a bunch of bullsh#@. Since there has been so little comprehensive coverage in the MSM of this topic, it is disengenuous at the very least to say RFK Jr doesn't add anything new. Who cares. The majority of the public is not familiar with this topic. Any lengthy article that is well written as Kennedy's was, is a welcome reprieve from the usual crap we get to read.

Blackwell himself did over a dozen outrageous things to mess up the number of Democrats that could and did vote. Then there is the giant army of ethically impaired Rethugs who were doing all they could, both shady and down right illegal, to mess up the vote.

And while the author says that over 129,000 people left the long lines, that these people would have voted 50/50 for Bush and Kerry. You don't know that to be true (and it is absurd since the long lines were in Democratic strongholds). Yet, you castagate Kennedy for saying things he doesn't know to be true. I smell a hypocrite. Lastly, who cares what is said by the spineless Democratic Party. They are afraid of being labeled so they purposely produce useless analysis on election fraud.

something about a pot calling a kettle black.

regardless of where you stand, farheed's exposition is a poorly sustained argument, even if kennedy's is also.

salon: you should be ashamed.

What Manjoo fails to account for -- and therefore removes much of his objections -- is the claim that the 2000 election was also flawed. (And the 2002 election, by implication, as well, though that was not a presidential year.) His first point, about counties voting differently on state-wide elections than presidential elections, is dismissed on this point. He further doesn't account for the fact that after the 200 elections predicted an Al Gore win based on exit polling, the pollsters tightened up their polling methods for the 2002 and 2004 elections. Exit polling isn't the election, but Manjoo fails to counter Kennedy's observation that the Democrats surveyed were more likely to be reticent than the Republicans.

Robert Heinlein predicted that a religious, rightwing extremist named Nehemiah Scudder would win the 2012 election and there would be no elections after that, resulting in the Second American Revolution. He was only 12 years off.

Farhad Manjoo and the editors at Salon should know by now that I am not a fan of the great majority of his work. The one exception that comes readily to mind is his fairly recent article on the net neutrality debate which was excellent. Having said that, and also wanting to make clear that I don't think Manjoo should be the go-to guy on election 2004 any more than Michelle Goldberg should be the reporter covering anti-war rallies sponsored by ANSWER or Arabs in NYC, I believe what he writes in this article is correct.

I do believe that Republicans like Ohio's Ken Blackwell did have their thumbs on the scale in 2004 and did everything they could to make the outcome as favorable to Bush as possible, but I don't believe election 2004 was stolen from John Kerry. The fact is, John Kerry just wasn't a very good candidate and Bush/Rove used everything they could to whip up "vote for us or die" fear. Remember all the terror warnings? Remember how they stopped right after the election? Remember how Bush's good buddy Osama bin Laden came to his rescue with a well-timed video tape in October?

We have seen a stolen election. That happened in 2000 in Florida (Perhaps Manjoo could write about that?) and it ultimately involved a plainly partisan, extraconstitutional ruling by the USSC to pull it off. ("The counting of votes must be stopped lest Mr. Bush's claim to the presidency suffer irreparable harm.") But 2004? No, not stolen. At least not in Ohio.

RFK Jr. really shook my faith in his ability to approach issues honestly with his previous article on vaccinations and autism. His current work on display in Rolling Stone is little if any better.

People posting comments here really should not resort to vulgarities and accusations of being a Republican hack simply because Manjoo does not tell them what it is they want to hear. In this case, Manjoo is right. Bush was not elected in 2000 but he surely was in 2004. For him, 9/11 was the gift that kept on giving. His other gift in 2004? A Democratic Party that offered up John "I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it" and "The Iraq war is a mistake but knowing everything I know now, I still would have voted for it" Kerry as a candidate because people in Iowa voted not for the guy with clear positions but for the guy they thought the rest of the country would somehow find "electable."

Really people, I voted for John Kerry but even I had a hard time selling and explaining him to others. It speaks volumes that we came as close to winning as we did with Kerry at the top of the ticket. We lost. It wasn't stolen.