You pick one of your worst reporters, already on the record as having made up his mind regarding previous elections.

You have him review RFKjr's second major steaming heap o' bullshit crackpot tinfoil hat conspiracy--his last one was the nonexistent connection between autism and immunizations.

Add these together and now the issues are even more clusterfucked than before.

Look, I voted for Gore and Kerry and I loathe Bush and his Satanic minions.

However, has anyone heard Senator Gore or Senator Kerry on the record just once say their respective elections were stolen?

No? I didn't think so.

So do us all a favor and S.T.F.U. Unless, of course, your dumbass theory includes an audioanamatronic Gore and Kerry programmed to speak in monotones and fail to defend themselves from even the most basic and base partisan attacks on the campaign trail.

Hey, wait a minute...I may be onto something here.....

Does Mr. Manjoo or anyone else think that people who advocate the routine use of torture would balk at election theft? The Republicans had the means, motive and opportunity.

To quote another letter writer, who has summed up my thoughts: "When someone, like Manjoo, denies the reality of something I have experienced personally my inclination is to ignore them, and I certainly will ignore Manjoo from now on. I don't know what his agenda is, but he's got one, and it doesn't have much to do with the truth. Kennedy is far from perfect . . . .and he's far more credible than whatever the rightwing serves up through Manjoo.

I was sorry to see Salon publish this deceptive piece."

AS a paying member of Salon, I must now question the wisdom of supporting someone who misses the entire point of the Kennedy article. We must question the election, the MSM will not even let a whisper of this out, except in references to tinfoil hats and blogs. The vast majority of the American populace do not want to even admit that such a thing COULD happen, it is most important to ask DID it happen, and how could it happen. Manjoo seems to have a real personal agenda here, and frankly Salon is supposed to be a little more objective. An article with more encouragment for the questioning, and less worrying about the detailed analysis, which can come later would have been more appropriate at this point.

If I were to propose to count political election votes in secret, nobody would or should trust that. Today, instead of a single person or committee retiring to a back room to do the secret counting, a corporate vendor hides behind touch screen software to do the counting invisibly and secretly.

Touch screen balloting results are taken completely on faith and counted in secret.

That sets up a wall of secrecy around the most public of all functions, vote counting. It removes evidence since even electronic ballots are often claimed to be in proprietary formats and so are "trade secrets."

Once the wall of secrecy is set up around vote counting, a couple things necessarily result:

1. There's no basis for confidence in the results of elections.

2. Concerned citizens are forced to make educated guesses about what's going on behind the wall of vote counting secrecy, using limited available information, as they must.

3. As a result of the above secrecy plus citizen activism, Manjoo, and his supporters accuse the concerned citizens of being "conspiracy theorists" for doubting the results of this process and amassing available information.

It seems clear to me that at least under these circumstances the "conspiracy theory" attack is a DE FACTO protection of secrecy that really shouldn't exist.

But the real issue, one that changes everything, is the secret vote counting.

Maybe Manjoo is somewhat right or totally right but nevertheless deeply mistaken, in that it is no longer possible to prove anything regarding elections, they have slipped from the people's control and sight, but instead we bicker amongst ourselves. In fact, you can't prove that Bush won, except to state the numbers and demand belief from the skeptics.

Jefferson thought that all issues should be argued at the bar of public reason. Would love if Manjoo would help us get to that point.

Anybody who thinks stolen elections are not a big risk probably doesn't love America because you just don't "get" the attraction of controlling America to the corruptible. Or, perhaps many of us don't get that stealing an election is DOING JUSTICE for the zealots among us, who recognize all too painfully the consequences of the wrong side winning.

While conspiracy theories are necessarily quite often wrong, the anti-conspiracy theory folks are so committed to a form of naivete that it's hard to get a real debate going, and we miss what is perhaps the biggest development in democracy in over a century: secret vote counting. It may succeed because we don't have mechanisms to stop all the action and listen to this danger. In other words, if democracy has any real sentinels, they are not being listened to. Maybe they're making some flawed arguments, but arguments about stolen or not stolen miss the real story.

It seems to me that to have votes counted in secret by a political enemy is the picture of tyranny. To have them counted by a friend: the picture of corruption. To argue over who won and who lost in such a situation? Diversion, camouflage, tragedy -- we can only guess.

Elections are now pure Rohrschack test. Whether you've got no evidence, or some evidence but not enough to change the result, or even when you've enough to change the result you will be denounced as a partisan sour grapes loser. So, what this plainly means is that no matter what the level of damage to democracy, no one will do anything about it.

Who will put a stop to the bickering while democracy burns?

The favor of a reply by Mr. Manjoo is requested.

Could this forum somehow help bring this issue, which is bigger than the debate here so far, to the fore?