... not in the voting booths. Popular votes are always being tweaked and always will be.

But the media ignore the boring but crucial fact that presidents are chosen by the Electors, not by the voters. Thus the problem is how We-the-People choose the Electors, not the president.

Solution One would be to ban the Electoral College outright and choose the president by direct popular vote. A pretty idea for a democracy - how many other offices are chosen by electoral colleges. However, it's not a possible idea: enough people like the EC to keep it in place. Besides, we always know exactly how many electoral votes are cast in presidential elections - something we can't say about the popular vote.

Solution Two would be to reform the Electoral College. As of now 48 states choose all their electors at-large, meaning all electors are chosen by statewide popular vote. Thus, on the slimmest of popular margins a whole statesworth of electorships go to one party.

Can you say "Florida"? I knew you could!

Two states do it differently. Maine and Nebraska choose their electors the same way they choose senators and congressmen: only two at-large and the rest by local district. Thus, a statewide recount will have either only two electors at stake while a district recount will concern only one elector.

Can you say "Nebraska"? How about "Maine"?

I like to look upon the EC as our other congress. A special one-issue, one-vote congress. Just because the Founding Fathers and just about everyone else since didn't think it through doesn't mean we shouldn't today.

Regardless of whether Kennedy's or Manjoo's claims are correct in their face-off, the fact remains that the most powerful nation in the world is today ruled by a war criminal, G.W. Bush, and his Gang.

GSC

The pathetic spectacle of hand-waving arguments that Kerry might have lost the election due to fraud in Ohio continues, even after nearly two years.

Instead of wringing their hands over a state where Kerry lost by 120 thousand votes, perhaps all of the little election critics ought to examine the real "Florida" of 2004 - Wisconsin. If Kerry had lost Wisconsin, the Ohio results would be irrelevant.

Kerry won by only 11 thousand in Wisconsin, and unlike Ohio, Democratic activists were arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for actually suppressing the opposition vote. More importantly, Milwaukee officials could never determine how 5000 more ballots than registered voters were received, and no explanation other than fraud is proposed. There are also thousands of documented illegal votes from felons, the dead, and those voting multiple times. The evidence for the stealing of the Wisconsin election is much stronger than in Ohio.

Governor Doyle has vetoed voter ID bills three times that would help prevent these illegal votes. You have to show a photo ID to buy cold medicine, but not to vote. Need I mention which party Doyle belongs to?

Folks,

If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and floats like a duck, it's probably a duck. If the duck goes into a room and votes, and his vote is counted as "let's get rid of ducks", you really need to look at the room.

Manjoo continues to claim that it wasn't a duck in the first place.

Good grief, how bad does the election process have to get before Manjoo recognizes that THERE IS A PROBLEM with a system that disenfranchises HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF VOTERS in college and urban areas?

Manjoo continues to "tut, tut, tut" his way through the "of course we need to EXAMINE ways to reform elections", all the while ignoring the facts that the amount of fraud, incompetence, and illegality that surrounded Ohio was ALL BIASED against the democratic candidate, and that the recount process (Instant reform, actually) was derailed.

It's not the duck, it's the room.

Manjoo is not an advocate of election reform, he is a stalwart of doing nothing, all the while saying "tut, tut, tut, we should do something".

He doesn't present his own numbers, doesn't speak to the issues as a whole, and doesn't propose any change to the previous election process, or upcoming processes. No problem with the voting room in Manjoo's world.

Why the hell does Salon sponsor this guy?

Salon is not a "liberal" site, not a "Democratic" site, not much of a site at all. Salon has become a collection of random writers operating without editorial guidance under the auspices of Joan "I just don't know..." Walsh.

Subscribe to rolling stone, drop Salon.

the precise numbers and the reports which referenced them are details that cloud the issue. any voters that were unable to cast their votes would have led to a result that is not accurateor true. we can never know the true results. this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. if citizens cannot vote and expect their vote to be counted, then the system of government we have is not a democracy.

It begins with the very title of this article- a blatant provocation designed to make a liberal reader of this site do a whiplash triple take. I’ve gotten used to such titles on Salon, realizing that they are designed to garner impulse clicks and that the article itself will be more balanced. But in this case, the entire premise of the article seems to me a provocation.

This article could have been approached differently. It could have, first of all, made it a primary goal to inform readers that someone (and we should be grateful for this) has taken it upon himself to put a serious address out in the public consciousness by writing about it in Rolling Stone. This article could have then summarized the issues Kennedy brings up and added more insight, along with a few ‘by the way this conclusion of Kennedy’s I disagree with or found questionable’ put in as asides. However, what should have been asides was made the main focus of Manjoo’s article. I don’t understand the gain of this approach. It’s contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, for the sake of pushing readers’ buttons. Such tactics are not necessary, I would think, for intelligent readers.