Letters to the Editor
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the wrong standard
Joan,
Salon appears to be taking the stance that you are not interested in allegations of crooked elections, unless we can prove without a shadow of doubt that not only did voter fraud happen, but that it happened at a level that conclusively was sufficient to provide the margin of victory. In a country governed by secret ballot, this is likely to be impossible even if rampant cheating is going on.
I take a different tack: democracies are based on the consent of the governed (presuming that we don't take seriously the current GOP fad of trying to restore the concept of Divine Right). A government that is trying to establish its legitimacy needs to be free of the possibility that its regime is based on a stolen election. The evidence that something rather wrong happened in Ohio appears by now to be overwhelming. Considering the profound implications of this possibility, brushing it under the carpet seems irresponsible. The burden of proof should be on the people claiming to have won the election, not on the people questioning its integrity.
Some of the questions raised would appear to be resolvable in an objective sense, but your battle of the pundits approach to this topic has left the reader without any resolution to these questions. One example of this is the question of what the exit polls said and what their claimed margin of error was. Kennedy and Manjoo make conflicting claims about what the margin of error actually was. In particular, Manjoo claims the margin of error was as large as 4%, which is difficult to believe given the sample size of an exit poll.
There are many aspects of Kennedy's piece that really have not been adequately rebutted by Manjoo. But I am comforted by his ability to conjure explanations from thin air rather than face disturbing possibilities. In particular, the argument that voters in Southwest Ohio (and apparently only in that part of the state) supported Connally for a statewide judgeship at a higher level than they supported Kerry is really inventive for his elasticity. Apparently the lack of party identification explains this statistical phenomenon! It seems curious to this reader that this relative indifference to party ID in this race is confined to those 12 counties. One would not have thought, a priori, that the more conservative counties would have had this curious relative bias towards voting for a black liberal judge.
How does this bizarre explanation square with Kerry's superior showing relative to Connally in the rest of the state, where exactly the same conditions were present?
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Why only Democratic voters?
Why do all the "problems" in voting occur mostly in districts filled with Democratic voters? Why aren't there similar problems in lilly-white Republican suburban districts? This alone makes me read such pieces as Kennedy's article with a favorabale eye.
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What is "proof" for Salon?
I've read and assimilated the criticisms of Kennedy's presentation. And the word they seem to have in common is "proof", as in lack of.
What would be proof? It seems that the simple breakdown of the exit polls and their lack of correlation to reality would be a slam dunk. To a person who understands the basics of statistics it certainly is: Democrats did not, as a group, suddenly decide to lie to exit pollsters (not to mention pre-election pollsters) in certain districts. It can't happen, and positing that it did to make the stats fit the outcome is ad-hoc nonsense. People favored Kerry. Kerry lost. Impossible. The exit polls were accurate as usual everywhere else but the magical places where Republicans needed to win at the last possible second. And of course, we have the false terrorist alert allegedly from Homeland Security, who denied issuing it, which was used to ban reporters from watching one recount which magically swung to Bush. I don't need conspiracy. I watched it happen on TV on election night. I just bothered to remember.
So proof seems to be: the Republicans, or at least some of them, must confess their crime. No other standard will do, since mathematics seems beyond Americans. So. We need for Blackwell, soon to be rewarded the Governorship of his state for his part, to pony up to a mic and confess his sin. Nothing else seems to do.
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If you really want to be fair
If Salon really wants to be fair, you need to give Robert Kennedy a forum to rebut the article you published on the Ohio Election. If you do not allow Mr. Kennedy a forum on Salon, I will not renew my subscription. I will wash my hands of Salon.
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Repealing Human Nature
Salon once again proves itself to be the political correctness pope condemning RFK Jr. for his careful examination of reality. And as with Gallileo, it will take many years for institutional memory to accept the obviousness of his evidence and conclusions, though it will never affect present day analysis. Power only seems to defend itself and human nature only asserts itself in the past, so history has nothing to teach us.
But for those of us where the rubber meets the road, who cannot afford to live in fantasyland, the reality of human nature must be confronted. Man is a social animal that promotes its personal agenda through connivance whether it be inconsequential matters like office politics or the probating of the family will or serious matters where real power and money are at stake. Organized crime, political action committees, the World Bank are all examples of how the powerful conspire to protect their immense interests from the other 98% of the planet. In fact, it would seem utter folly to leave politics to mere chance when vast fortunes are at stake. We see this clearly in Venezuela today, Nicaragua in the 80's as well as today, Chile in the '70's, Guatemala and Iran of the '50's but somehow think the most important nation on the planet is an olly olly oxen free zone.
My years of experience in the criminal law have taught me that when you allow this sort of conduct to go unpunished, the perpetrators only become more daring and greedier. But I fear the situation is rapidly spiraling out of our control and by the time the mainstream finally wakes up to the obvious, they will have no power to respond in any meaningful way. Meanwhile Salon remains as purblind as many privileged parents who refuse to recognize the delinquency of their precious offspring as criminality.
And history will have the last laugh, as it has with so many other nations and empires while the Salons of the distant future remain perplexed at how America could not see blatant corruption and conspiracy when it was smacking them in the face. Man is not the rational animal, rather he is the rationalizing, the conspiring animal; only the psychologically unsophisticated reject this analysis. And it seems that whenever I begin to weaken and consider subscribing, you manage to say something really, really, really stupid.