Kennedy And Manjoo
by tristero
Kennedy responds, as he had to, and Manjoo responds to Kennedy.
The least compelling arguments:
Kennedy pulls a bait and switch close to the beginning on the 3 percent/2 percent who were "disenfranchised by the long lines in Ohio":Manjoo seizes on one line in the 204-page report and then attempts to play a clumsy game of gotcha. But if he had read more carefully he would have understood that the 129,543 votes he refers to were only a subset of those disenfranchised by the long lines. Had Manjoo read a mere paragraph further in the report, he would have seen that it identifies a second group, comprising roughly 48,000 citizens, or 0.83 percent of Ohio's electorate, whose votes were also suppressed because of the lines and other factors [Emphasis added.].
I haven't worked through the details of Kennedy's argument to gauge the extent to which the "other factors" affect his point about the size of the group of voters disenfranchised by the long lines. At the least, it's a bit - not a lot, but a bit - sloppy on Kennedy's part.
Manjoo, however, seems on very shaky ground in his attempt to salvage his rebuttal of the "Connally Anomaly." He found one ignoramus who didn't know how "liberal" Connally was. No doubt he can find a second (that Ignoramus 1 has a rep as an Ohio voting expert would seem to say more about his qualifications than anything else; he's certainly a rotten witness for Manjoo's point in this context). Barring confounding factors (eg, party affiliation wasn't printed on the voting ballots), it seems highly unlikely, however, that ignorance played a large role in the discrepancy between Connally's tallies and Kerry's, although like any other halfway reasonable factor, it had some.*
And Kennedy's rebuttal of the Black and Resnick results from 2000 seem very plausible. Yes, Kucinich was wrong, twice before, down-ticket candidates outperformed presidential candidates. The relevant number is how often does that occur? Neither Kennedy nor Manjoo say here (nor do I recall their saying so in the original article). I suspect, however, it is quite rare. Otherwise, Manjoo would have cited more examples than just these two.
Bottom line: I'll anger a lot of you, but based on the information in Kennedy's first article, Manjoo's response and this new article, I believe it is a seriously open question as to what actually happened in Ohio in 2004. Without further, extensive investigation honest people will disagree on whether it was stolen or whether Bush would have won anyway. If the latter, it seems it would have been a squeaker.
What is beyond dispute either by Kennedy or Manjoo are two points. First, what happened in Ohio (if not elsewhere) stinks to high heaven. Agreed. Second, if America is still a democracy, then election form is what the president of the United States should be using his bully pulpit to advocate, not ways to use the Constitution to empower gay bashing. Agreed.
*Dan Tokaji, the voting expert who didn't know the politics of Connally, says, "So inferring election fraud in 12 counties based on Connally's vote total is, in my view, quite a stretch." Correct me if I"m wrong here, but the discrepancy between Connally's and Kerry's vote totals was one of several factors that led Kennedy to infer voting fraud in 12 counties. The convergence of highly smelly data, all trending clearly in one direction, is what leads to the inference, not one single piece of trash.