Letters to the Editor
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Salon is so Fair Minded
Whether Manjoo is right or wrong is of little consequence to me. While I do not expect Salon to print something it believes is false, it is what Salon chooses to report on that bothers me. I wish some of the more popular conservative websites would publish fair-minded stories that are critical of the prominent GOP positions in the media.
But nooooo, those GOP bastards like winning elections!!
There are a number of free websites out there publishing stories critical of liberal positions and here I am paying for one. And I don't need some panty waste teling me how liberalism is taking a fair look at both sides of an issue. There were a fair amount of election irregularities in the past two presidential elections. I wish Salon would be more choosey about the issues by which they illustrate their liberalism.
You guys have really been doing the devils dirty work very well lately. Perhaps some conservatives will make up for the many subscriptions I will not be renewing.
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Any other Salon writer would have been an improvement
Because I have never warmed to Manjoo's journalistic style, count me among those readers who wish that someone else had covered this issue. After previously struggling through a few of Manjoo's articles, I now routinely skip his contributions in favor of those from more readable writers, but today I decided to give his work another chance because of the topic. Instead of being able to breeze through the text and come away having been both educated and entertained (as I am with most other Salon writers), it was like wading through mud. Again.
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Could The Article Be More Dismissive?
I love the way hard core problems are simply dismissed by the author.
Voting machines reallocated so that the Dem counties have almost none and the Red counties have dozens? Dismissed. "Why, it was probably more likely just simple confusion than anything else! Certainly one of Bush loyal servants would NEVER do anything like that on purpose." Then the author turns into a mind reader and states that, of course, the four hour waits PROBABLY wouldn't have changed the outcome by much, if anything, so who cares? "Even if there was some mild, tiny problem with allocating the voting machines, well, surely the outsome would have been EXACTLY the same so who cares?"
The election was rigged. Every single dirty trick Ohio got away with is dismissed by the author as simply being unimportant or unintentional and ultimately having no effect on the election outcome whatsoever.
So why bother with election with reform then, Farhad?
Is the author totally full of shit when he opens the article saying he "hopes" Kennedy will really address the flaws in our voting process? Because every single time brings up a huge flaw the author dismesses it as inconsequential and then breaks his back trying to "prove" that such flaws or outright dirty tricks wouldn't have changed anything at all!
Farhad, you're full of shit. Sorry buddy, but that whole song and dance about how you'd really like to see the election process "reformed" and then you spend the entire article going on and on about how LITERALLY nothing occured that whould have made any difference in the elections outcome -- that pretty much proves that you don't think anything should be changed at all. Why should we if all the problems outlined wouldn't have changed the outcome in any way???
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Headline completely incorrect
Farhad Manjoo can have his time to try and disprove any of the claims presented in Kennedy's piece. That's fine.
What's not ok, is Salon putting in a headline that is incorrect to the "proofs" that Mr Manjoo has presented.
The best that can be concluded from Manjoos article is "No one knows for sure whether or not Bush actually won Ohio" There's no smoking gun, but there sure are a lot of things that all seem to point in the same direction that Bush did not win the election legitimately.
Which all goes to the point of Kennedy's article. We can't have a democracy if the population can't believe the results. Election reform is necessary for our democracy to continue. Diebold should be banned from selling any more electronic equipment. Paper ballots / paper trails are not a luxury, they are a necessity for fair elections.
Kennedy's piece is a wake-up call to force our greased-palm politicians to actually install real reforms into our elections. Nothing less than we demand for third-world elections that we over-see is required for this United States democracy to continue.
It's time for Salon to stop using Mr Manjoo on this subject and use someone who can be objective.
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Reality
Manjoo is a tool.
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Scratching my head...
...over this piece. I'm not sure I understand Manjoo's purpose in writing it or Salon's purpose in publishing it--unless they're just collecting up the benjamins.
Do they imagine that readers will be unable to find suitable criticism of RFK's Rolling Stone story somewhere other than at Salon? Or do they simply want to "scoop" the Washington Times and Fox News?
A responsible publication goes to press with a factually comprehensive and analytically muscular story on a topic of this importance--or not at all.
Perhaps this is meant to stir up the crowd a little and boost traffic. I guess that's part of the business, but it doesn't make it any less disappointing to encounter such insubstantial "journalism" at the generally creditable Salon.com.
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We could have been hoisted on our own petard
Many Democrats are furious about the 2000 election because Gore won the popular vote yet did not become president. Had there been a recount, I'm still not sure Gore would have won the state (since the election I've heard he would have won and he would have lost, so I'm going to leave that in the realm of the great unknowables of life). If Kerry had won in Ohio, Bush would have won the popular vote and Kerry would have won the electoral college. Gore voters, I include myself among these, though I voted for Nader (I lived in Idaho, talk about your vote not mattering) clung to this notion of the popular will being thwarted, and how awful that was, and how we should fix the system so this cannot happen again.
Would we have been so sympathetic in 2004 if Kerry won the electoral college? Would we still put so much emphasis on "the popular will"? Or would it have been "our due"? It seems as though this is what this is about. Manjoo is right, there isn't enough convincing evidence that Ohio was stolen (and Zogby can say it was the dirtiest election and still not have it be stolen). It doesn't, however, mean that it wasn't dirty. It just probably didn't rise to the level of being stolen. I think we would be less concerned about dirty elections in Ohio if Kerry had won.
BTW, many of the letter writers focus on the exit polls. Having a background in sociology and survey research, I can tell you that we aren't as good at surveys as the general public thinks. There are limits to what we can find out with surveys, especially exit polls in cloose elections. I would caution people to put less weight on exit polls. Its a shame that in the aftermath of the 2000 election there was a concerted effort to fix exit polling and little willingness to fix the voting system.