Lori, you said almost everything I wanted to say, and beautifully, so I won't reiterate it.

Anyone who could look at the evidence presented by Kennedy and claim that there's nothing whatsoever to investigate is unworthy of a Salon byline, as far as I'm concerned. Or is this Salon's "official" opinion, that anyone who doesn't think the 2004 election was just fine and dandy is talking through his or her little propellor beanie?

But here's the passage that really made my jaw hit the wrist pad:

Listen to the chairman of the board of Franklin's election office, an African-American man named William Anthony, who also headed the county's Democratic Party. As I first pointed out in my review of "Fooled Again," any effort to deliberately skew the vote toward Bush in Franklin would have had to involve Anthony -- and he has rejected the charge that he'd do such a thing. "I am a black man. Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?" Anthony told the Columbus Dispatch. "I've fought my whole life for people's right to vote."

Um, what color is Kenneth Blackwell again?

Who cares what Manjoo has to say? He's a fool.

Right, Lori, the confirmation notices were sent in this case; that's why I didn't mention that requirement, because that hasn't been a point of controversy and I didn't want to muddy the argument with electoral technicalities that aren't in dispute (as far as I know nobody alleges they weren't sent; Kennedy doesn't).

Look at Ms. Hicks-Hudson's quote here (an article that Kennedy cites as his source for his assertion that thousands of Kerry voters were hurt by such purges):

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334&SearchID

"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."

Baron, his observation is false; as I pointed out, he's misreading the data. Here's how I explained it on page 4 of my article -- it is a difficult concept to convey and I may not be doing it well, so I'd honestly like to know if you can tell me what about this explanation doesn't work for you.

...Mitofsky indeed shows that in precincts where Bush got 80 percent or more of the vote, an average of 56 percent of people who were approached volunteered to take part in the poll, while in precincts where Kerry got 80 percent or more of the vote, a lower average of 53 percent of people were willing to be surveyed. But these numbers don't reveal how Bush voters or Kerry voters behaved, they only show how all voters, taken together in average, responded in certain precincts. They are irrelevant to the question of whether fraud occurred.

As Mark Lindeman, a political scientist at Bard College, explained to me, the numbers Kennedy cites fit the theory that Kerry voters were more likely to respond to pollsters than Bush voters. For instance, in the Bush strongholds -- where the average completion rate was 56 percent -- it's possible that only 53 percent of those who voted for Bush were willing to be polled, while people who voted for Kerry participated at a higher 59 percent rate. Meanwhile, in the Kerry strongholds, where Mitofsky found a 53 percent average completion rate, it's possible that Bush voters participated 50 percent of the time, while Kerry voters were willing to be interviewed 56 percent of the time. In this scenario, the averages work out to the same ones Kennedy cited: a 56 percent average response rate in Bush strongholds, and a 53 percent average response rate in Kerry strongholds. But in both Bush strongholds and Kerry strongholds, Kerry voters would have been responding at a higher rate, skewing the poll toward Kerry.

Since you seem to be following these letters pretty closely, I have one question on exit polling which troubles me that I would dearly like to have a solid answer to:

In the modern era of national elections, how many times previous to 2000 (with Gore in Florida) have exit polls proven to be wrong? Going further, how many statewide exit polls for electoral office (president, senator or governor) in the modern era have been wrong? Honestly, prior to Florida in 2000, I simply do not ever recall projections based on exit polling later needing to be explained away as wrong. Do you?

For me, the most telling piece of desperation here is this passage:

"As for Freeman's 660,000 to 1 statistic, it is irrelevant. ... The statistic measures the probability that the errors in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida occurred due to chance or random error, and according to Freeman, that probability is very low. But nobody argues the errors happened by chance. Everyone in the exit poll debate agrees that there was a systematic cause for the errors in the poll. Freeman, Kennedy, et al., claim that the systematic cause was fraud, while Mitofsky and many in the polling community claim the cause was a problem with the poll. So Freeman's argument that it would take preposterous odds to produce a random sampling error is a straw-man assertion."

You take the most important fact in this debate, the point of commensuration between two feuding groups, and simply declare that your explanation is right. In your mind, because Mitofsky claims the "systematic" error was in the polling (which is contentious, even though you claim an anonymous "many in the polling community" agree with him), the possibility the systematic error was fraud is therefore null and void. What?

How does a competing claim based on the same evidence make one side "a straw-man assertion"? If in fact fraud was committed, then Freeman's statistic is hugely important. And Kennedy and others have submitted a grocery list of fraudulent activity.

Freeman's statistic is essential, because it shows whatever happened in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida was DELIBERATE and not due to chance. Your assertion that the deliberate mistake was in the polling does not mean you are right and Freeman's number is irrelevant. It means Freeman's number points to _something_, and other evidence will determine what that something is.