Thank you Salon for this excellent and interesting debate. I read the Rolling Stone article last week and found it rather damning. And so I was equally intrigued by the Manjoo retort. But conflicting articles like this always leave the reader wondering what to think.

Like in so many arguments, once the "gotchas" are stripped away you eventually end up with facts that everyone essentially agree on, and then the assumptions each side makes around those facts. This followup exchange helped reach that point, no matter which side of the fence you land on.

As for myself, I think Kennedy roundly thumped Manjoo in this debate. I'm reminded of those pictures that are formed out of hundreds of smaller photos that, when viewed from a distance, form a completely different image. Manjoo's arguments would be well served by his stepping back a couple feet and looking at that larger image.

This whole debate is a great example of why the Democrats can't get any traction in national politics. We can't seem to accept the fact that many Americans - indeed, sometimes more than half - find Republican candidates not only palatable but preferable to Democratic ones. In all of the acrimony about the 2004 election, we seem to have forgotten that the Republicans control both chambers of Congress and more than half of the country's governorships. Did they steal those elections too? Democrats need to accept the fact that they have been out-maneuvered by a stealthy, mean-spirited but highly effective grassroots mobilization that has taken 30 years. If Democrats want to win elections in the future, they'll have to stop hoping and praying that the Michael Moore's and Robert Kennedy Jr.'s of the country will uncover some shocking conspiracy and they'll have to start doing the heavy lifting that democratic politics requires.

Lisa M., New Brunswick, NJ

I was counsel of record in litigation over both the 2000 Ohio Supreme Court election and the 2004 Ohio Presidential election.

I write in response to the Salon Magazine article challenging Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s Rolling Stone Magazine article which asserts that the 2004 Presidential election was stolen.

In his response to RFK Farhad Manjoo correctly points out that in the 2000 election, Democratic state supreme court candidate Alice Resnick got more votes than Al Gore in dozens of counties -- and by 126,000 more votes throughout the state.

However, this was a truly exceptional situation, and those familiar with it would not argue that it disproves Kennedy’s thesis.

As part of their plan to pack the Ohio courts with business friendly justices, the Ohio and US Chambers of Commerce in year 2000 spent a total of some $7 million of illegal corporate money attacking Justice Resnick.

Because of litigation we filed, a hearing was held by the Ohio Elections Commission. The hearing was held on the very day before the 2000 election. At that hearing the Ohio Elections Commission found probable cause that the Chambers’ ads contained false statements about Justice Resnick and that their conduct violated practically every election law on the books.

This spectacular decision the day before election day was front page news in every newspaper in the state on election day.

Most voters had seen the ads attacking Democrat Resnick. The Ohio Elections Commission ruling that the ads were a lie made the $7 million of attack advertising backfire, with the effect that Resnick got more votes than Gore. (For information about our chamber of commerce litigation go to http://www.ohiohonestelections.org/index.php?p=chamber-... ).

Manjoo also fails to note the fact that weeks before election day, Gore had pulled all resources and

campaign staff out of Ohio.

This exception proves the rule, correctly stated by Congressman Kucinich and Robert Kennedy, that the top of the ticket normally draws more votes than down ticket races. Furthermore, in the twelve suspect Ohio counties in the 2004 election, the anomaly of Kerry reportedly underperforming the ticket extends down to races for county commissioner, sheriff, and such lesser offices, where these Democratic candidates lost in these predominantly Republican counties.

Cliff Arnebeck

"(As Kennedy indicates, there is some internal inconsistency in the report, since the executive summary also adds up these two categories; it's only when you drill down beyond the summary into the meat of the 204-page report, as I did, that you find the real numbers.)"

Don't know where it is that one drills for meat, but, gross...

I truly appreciate the rigorous and thoroughgoing discussion featured of late on Salon's pages. For quite some time, I've thought that Mr. Manjoo was almost pathologically unable to accept that a variety of shenanigans could add up to a an election unfairly thrown to the man with the best network of operatives. I am less certain today that he truly believes things did not go awry, but give great respect to him for maintaining a high standard of proof. Even repeated and various examples of misconduct, frustration and inefficiency at the edges, though they could indeed be parts of a whole effort, finally mean nothing without conclusive documentary evidence.

That being said, the questions that Mr. Kennedy has kept alive are critical to the ongoing analysis of the 2004 elections - not because the result is at some point likely to be overturned, but because the light of day needs to be shined on those methods which could, (and probably have been, face it Farhad), used to subvert the results of free elections in our country. These discussions are primary to our democracy, since we need to develop the analytical tools to certify that our electoral process is everything that it should be: representative of the majority and untainted by shady gamesmanship.

Well, I will certain give Mr. Manjoo credit for one thing. It was brave of him, if not entirely wise perhaps, to provide a link to Steven Freeman's article on exit polls. The Freeman article makes clear that 1) the discrepancy between the exit poll and the actual count could not possibly have arisen by chance; and 2) the haphazard "explanations" for the discrepancy (undercount of GOP voters, too many women, etc.) are just pieinthsky speculations until some evidence is provided.

With regard to Ohio, specifically, Freeman asserts "It turns out that the likelihood that Kerry would poll 52.1% from a population in which he receives only 48.5% of the vote is less than one-in-one hundred (.0073)." I only cite Ohio in this regard because it was in the end the most important and controversial of the three big contested states, and the one with the biggest discrepancy between poll and vote: 6.7%, outside the margin of error, NOT within the margin, as Manjoo idiotically maintains. In fact, the other two seminal battleground states, Florida and Pennsylvania, returned vote totals that differed from the exit polls by amounts almost equally great: 4.9% and 6.5%, respectively. Assuming a margin of error of 5% (greater than 5% would only apply to states where the sample was smaller), that means the discrepancy just barely makes the margin for Florida, and is, again, way off for Pennsylvania.

ONLY by WILLFULLY misreading the data can Manjoo come up with his statement that the Ohio poll result was "within" the margin of error. INDEED, the exit poll for Ohio, showing a Kerry lead of 4.2%, was within the margin, which would and could, however, ONLY lead to the conclusion that any result other than a Kerry win was not possible. It's the DISCREPANCY BETWEEEN exit and poll that must be judged against the "margin of error," not the poll's results itself. Manjoo writes as if he simply did not know what the phrase "margin of error" means. In any case, it is nothing less than obfuscation on his part for him to fail to mention Freeman's most damning observation, ie, that it is entirely possible the numbers he [Freeman] cites had previously been "partially calibrated" (viz., "corrected"-mh) before showing up on CNN's website on election night. In other words, it could very well be that the real RAW exit numbers were even HIGHER for Kerry.

And he plays games with words, instead of offering substantive arguments, elsewhere in his "refutation" of Kennedy. AS IF it really makes a difference, whether a potential voter actually walked off a voting line at a precinct or never went to the polling precinct in the first place. AS IF it makes a difference whether a registration was actually "lost," or merely "at serious risk for" being lost in error. It is ridiculous pettiness for Manjoo to try to maintain these distinctions. Worse is his failure to mention, as Kennedy points out, that in both instances the respective authors of two comprehensive studies of Ohio's 2004 vote underscored that their estimates were deliberately conservative. Both insisted that the actual numbers were "probably higher."

All of the "evidence" or "studies" cited by Manjoo actually show, quite simply and clearly, to anyone who is reading with an unprejudiced eye, the exact opposite of what he himself claims. The 2004 results are simply incredible without supposing massive fraud. When I first read Manjoo's "refutation" of Kennedy I thought his arguments quite solid. But now that I've seen the underlying data, Freeman's actual expert opinion (instead of Manjoo's bastardized version of it) and Kennedy's utterly convincing rebuttal, I understand the scale of Manjoo's intellectual sloppiness as well as the depths of hist rhetorical slipperiness. Mr. Manjoo needs to acknowledge his own bad faith and, much more importantly, our country needs a real accounting of what happened to our democracy in Ohio and elsewhere 18 months ago.