You put a feminist blogger on a political serious case and what you get is .... a mess.

Simply put - I don't see why Salon keeps this reporter on staff. How obvious does the evidence have to be?

i have made the case that the ohio election would be flawed since before 2004 the election, have written sec of state blackwell and accused him of making preperations to throw the election and on and on and on.. but since im just one dude without any press pass or greatly linked blog or anything, no one wanted to listen etc. the sec of state of ohio ceased accepting applications from districts largely comprised of poor folks who under normal conditions would have been prime for mid year/ pre election voting drives. this source of democrat power was shut off in a fashion in which begs the question, why do this, what is the motivation etc. Clearly state officals can work the system in favor of rigging elections by cutting of sources of voters, even if such districts had previously been radically gerrymandered. Sec of State Blackwell and the sec of state from many other "swing states" must have actively participated in a overarching mandate to throw potential votes to the curb before the election. This abuse of local power has been set up as the key to ensure Republican electoral votes since before the 2000 election. One could surmise that 2000 was the test case for such impure tactics with regards to imposing the strangle hold over midwest swing voters, as in, cut off their air and they cannot breathe. Local legislative authorities and election officals can control the outcomes of elections! DUH! I mean I live and vote in Detroit. In this most democrat of cities, Republican officals were openly contesting nearly every ballot in several districts that, yeah have small voting blocks, but could have thrown votes. The main thing that prevented this was that these individuals were white in largely black neighborhoods, and basically were arrested for disturbing the peace, as in these people were about to get shot for their overzealous and seemingly intrusive nature. It was found later that there indiviudals were from out of district and were using fake identification in order to perpertrate these lame and arrogant complaints. That was in Detroit, a bastion of Democrats, one can only imagine what was happening in more highly contested districts in known swing areas. The 2004 Ohio vote was designed to be flawed with specific purpose to re-elect the Bush.

To determine whether or not Ohio, and thereby the presidency, was stolen, we must consider the preponderance of the evidence.

Sure, there can be "explanations" for statistical anomalies, but for Christ's sake, look at the mass of "irregularities," and to whom was the beneficiary in every case.

Manjoo is trying desperately not to come to the only rational conclusion, which is why he never broached the subject of the well-documented manipulation of the recount and the bogus "terrorist alert" that removed all independent observers from the vote-tallying process. Those two facts alone should convince any objective observer that the 2004 Ohio presidential results were skewed.

For those who may think that all of this debate about an election that took place here in Ohio almost 2 years ago is a waste of time and energy, may I quote from an article in this morning's Cleveland (OHIO) Plain Dealer?

Blackwell gets brunt of registrants' anger

He denies trying to disenfranchise voters

Democrats and representatives of voter-registration groups accused Secretary of State Ken Blackwell on Monday of trying to rig this November's election by publishing draconian new rules governing the activities of people who register voters.

Testifying at a hearing chaired by Judy Grady, Blackwell's director of elections, lawyers for ACORN, Common Cause, the Ohio Democratic Party and other groups said training documents drafted by Blackwell's office are so vague that they subject registrars to felony penalties for even inadvertent violations.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that one of the many provisions of the so-called election reform legislation (Ohio HB3) that passed the Republican-controlled Ohio House of Representatives in December 2005, was then passed by the Republican-controlled Ohio Senate shortly thereafter and signed into law by Republican Governor Bob Taft on Feb. 1st of this year, eliminates the state statutes that have allowed citizens to challenge the outcome of Federal elections within the state. The only apparent recourse for those wishing to officially question the vote count in a presidential, US Senate or US Congressional race in Ohio would be to petition the United States Congress to initiate a challenge. And did I mention that HB3 also quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts? In 2004, the charge was $10 per precinct. Now the charge will be $50 per precinct. (There are over 11,360 precincts in Ohio so anyone wanting a recount will now have to pony up $568,000.) Clearly 3rd party candidates aren't exactly welcome here in Ohio.

This was the Republican-dominated legislature's response to all of the problems we had in Ohio in 2004. Can any of you doubt the GOP stranglehold on this state? (Did you know that since the Civil War, only one presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy in 1960, has won the White House without carrying Ohio?) I believe Bob Fitrakis when he says that this and the other repressive legislation passed by the Ohio GOP will make it virtually impossible for anyone but a Republican to carry the Buckeye State in future statewide and federal elections.

So, do you really believe Manjoo's lame hypothesis that some huge conspiracy would have been required to put Ohio in Bush's pocket in 2004? Maybe if he lived here he wouldn't be so damned dismissive and arrogant about what went on here in 2004 and what continues to go on here.

But your time is coming, Mr. M. ... by the time the GOP is done here, "stealing" elections in Ohio will be perfectly legal!

The news agency pool that funded the Mitofsky/Edison polling apparatus in 2004 stipulated that the raw data not be made available for 9 months following the election. So it is that in August of 2005, the University of Michigan and the University of Connecticut/Roper Center have been making raw, Mitofsky exit poll data available for purchase.

Prior to the release of the raw data, one could purchase exit poll data that was both "massaged", as has been cited in these artcles, and also summarized into "geo-codes" from Edison Media Research. The geo-code breakdown has a very low level of granularity -- for example, all of Ohio consists of only six geo-codes -- and is not well suited to a demographically informed correlative analysis of polling vs. official results variances. It's also the case that some amount of raw data appears to have been leaked to the public at CNN.com during a brief period on election night. This set was rather small compared with the full raw data set that is now available.

It would be a significant boost to the health of our national debate on electoral reform if a team lead by an individual and/or team that can reasonably be considered to be "above reproach" in the area of statistics were to conduct an appropriate analysis of the raw exit poll data. Presumably such a team would analyze factors that a large consensus in the field would agree are statistically significant ones, likely including historical official election results, historical exit polling data, etc. There is a great store of election data available from the firm Election Data Services. While many will point out that exit poll data is notoriously inaccurate, I believe that a meaningful question is whether or not the inaccuracy is unexpectedly unevenly distributed in one direction - towards one candidate, and away from the other. I beileve such as study -- i.e. one conducted by an individual or team that is above reproach -- would boost the health of the debate regardless of how the analysis turned out.

Freeman's first celebrated study on the exit poll data was published before the release of the raw Mitofsky data, though as I recall, it took advantage of the telling, yet incomplete CNN "leaked" raw data. Perhaps he has since gained access to the raw data, and released an updated analysis. He has been a part of a fair amount of work on this topic, and now serves on the Voting Systems Board of the National Association of State Election Directors.

I put a world-renowed statistician in touch with one of the newspapers in the funding pool in the weeks after the 2004 election. It seemed the only way that a reputable statistician could gain access to the raw data during the 9-month black-out. The statistician was willing, the newspaper declined. In a more recent inquiry, the statistician said that he'd become too busy with new responsibilities.