Salon.com - Was the 2004 election stolen? No.

Was the 2004 election stolen? No. | Salon.com News (Farhad Manjoo)

This article is very critical of the Rolling Stone piece by RFK Jr. I am not deeply familiar with the examples that are criticized by the Salon article, but I wonder if the points are, in fairness, valid. There was a lot of criminal activity going on in Ohio as well as other states, but these articles never cease with the back and forth rebutting of claims. I just hope we get some election reform to remove all of this doubt in the system. That seems to be the most important point in all of this. If we get a system where there can be no doubt in it's validity as some exist in other countries, with the proper transparencies and efficiency, all of this will go on for every election for years to come.

Here is a section of the Salon.com article:

(snip)


more...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/

I am curious to see if he mentions this article in his show today (Ring of Fire - http://www.ringoffireradio.com/default1.asp)

He's a huge part of the reason I let my Salon membership lapse.

after mine lapsed they still charged my Credit Card, I had to get my bank to go after them.. they said it was a standard practice if you never replied back to them.

flies in the face of obvious realities.

either salon just wants to be nit picky and contratrian or they have an agenda to protect these criminals.

of urban areas which were mostly for Kerry into other areas with less population, and for bush.

Doesn't it dawn on anyone that the lines at the polls were on in those areas in Ohio. Remember blackwell trying to invalidate voter registration because the paper people registered on was NOT the right weight? Paper THE STATE SUPPLIED

At the very minimum voters were denied access to the polls in Ohio

In Florida, people were put on the felon list who didn't belong

What bothers me is where were the consultants to the Democrats who were supposed to have people on the ground to prevent this?

What were they paid for?

Straw Man - Setting up a assertion your opponent did not make & then knocking it down to leave the impression you have defeated his argument.
Kennedy never claimed that ALL 26 percent who were not on the rolls were Democrats - he made the logical inference (which was not answered) that the combination of unprecedented Democratic new registrations PLUS botched registrations would tend to favor the party in control of the lists - Republicans in this case. The reporter claims the "study showed no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters" whose names weren't listed - as most of these people's votes were never counted (see "The Crisis Papers" to learn what happened to most provisional ballots in Ohio) I wonder how the authors of this study came to this conclusion? During Watergate Ben Bradlee came up with the perfect description of this: the "non-denial denial, they doubt our ancestry but not our sources."

You have a good start & readers here at DU would be *mucho* appreciative...

:bounce:

Farhad Manjoo has NO stat that refutes Kennedy's "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots."

Example Dems register 1100 new voters, but 1000 do not make it through the system, GOP register 200 new voters, and 100 do not make through the system.

On election day all show up.

It is a tight near 50/50 race - at least by the "official count" - with 910 GOP to 900 Dem the count.

We move to the provisional ballots.

41 GOPers out of the 100 that showed up and that were not on the rolls cast a provisional ballot.

45 of the Dems out of the 1100 that showed up and were not on the rolls cast a provisional ballot - say because of too few polling workers because of too few polling places - just because of election judge hassling those he saw as Dems.

We get the Farhad Manjoo stat that he claims implies no wrong doing that could have changed the election - 951 GOP to 945 Dem with the provisional ballot proportion about 4% for both counts.

AND THIS PROVES NO THEFT OF ELECTION? - WHAT BULLSHIT.

The only fact thats imply any thing are a massive Dem registration and get out the vote attempt, and a massive failure to register the new voters.

Farhad Manjoo should be told to collect his check from the GOP, but to not expect the college graduates in the media to say he has proven anything.

should read their own damn magazine.

Hell one of the first strident criticism of the Ohio vote I read was none other than their featured columnist Christopher 'drunken idiot' Hitchens and Slate reprinted his Vantiy Fair article under Hitchen's terrible "fighting words' column...in fact I went back to get the URL from Slate! and it was purged from their site...?

What's up with that....?

http://letters.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/view/

At the link, above.

Salon vigorously defended the status quo in every election from the day they first plugged in their modem. They were "too hip" to support Gore, blamed everything they could on the Democrats, and worshiped the words that came out of the computers of the cocktail-party Left, whether on their own staff of not.

We've had six years of rapid social and economic regress, during which the mainly affluent white Salon crowd has done remarkably well. But whoever the Democratic presidential candidate is in 2008, they'll crack wise that s/he's "the best Republican candidate/president we've ever had" and accuse him/her of mass murder, corporatism, and poor taste in music.

Now that the Liberals, who they disdain like the neo-Cons do, have turned out to be correct about nearly everything, they're rushing to hold the line. Their "street cred" is shot, as if any of the petty-boo Salonistes spend a moment of their time on those streets, anyway -- not with their iPods, they don't! The past decade has proven that their old whipping boy, Al Gore, was the guy they should have been listening to all along, instead of Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Hehir, Farhad Manjoo, and other minor literary cynics.

Karl Marx once wrote that revolution isn't a garden party. It isn't a cocktail party, either. When wingnuts blather about "Latte Liberals," they're talking about their mirror image, which includes the Salon crowd. Maybe it's time someone realized that "progressive" ought to mean "progress", not the sneering elitism that infects far too many of the partisans of the left.

--p!