This will be my first ever diary on Daily Kos, but I don't expect anyone to go easy on me.
This afternoon I read with great interest Farhad Manjoo's rebuttal in Salon of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s article in Rolling Stone. I would ask you to believe me when I state that although I have been of the opinion since Nov 2 2004 that it was very likely that the election was fraudulent, I approach articles such as Mr. Manjoo's with a strange hope that this time I can have it explained to me in a way that allows me to finally get a good night's sleep, secure in the knowledge that nothing overtly untoward was going on, that the process of democracy in the United States is still hobbling along, flawed but basically intact. Despite my huge admiration for RFK Jr., and my lasting dream that he will one day soon be the most effective and honorable head of the EPA that this nation has ever had, deep inside I harbored a hope that he was wrong on this, and that Salon and Mr. Manjoo were going to show me the way.
Sorry to say, I'm just not there yet.
What I'm going to do is outline 3 out of 4 of Manjoo's rebuttals, and explain in each case why I just don't think they wash. I wish to do this in a spirit of openness, avoiding any hostility or undue sarcasm, and I would hope that people would afford me similar. I'm happy to be proven wrong on any or all of this. I admit straight up that I am in no way an expert in the fields of elections, statistics or politics and don't wish to pose as one. Statistics, in particular, I did three years of, but that was twenty years ago.
1. The Ohio Voter Purge
Manjoo's explanation for RFK Jr's claim that 300,000 voters had been scrubbed from the Ohio electoral role revolves around one single point:
Scrubbing the voting rolls of people who hadn't voted in prior elections isn't an arbitrary move. It's the law. Here's the relevant section of the Ohio code, 3503.19, which states that a person who "fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal elections" shall have his registration "canceled." To be sure, people who intended to vote and weren't aware of this rule could have been cut from the rolls, and you might say that's unfair. But that's an argument for a better election law, and not proof that the purges were part of a Republican election-theft plot"
He offers no further explanation for the purge.
My take:
Yes, Mr. Manjoo, there is a law. A harsh, restrictive law created by a Republican Governor at some point since 1995 (1) . Well, actually it's not the complete law. I went to the Ohio statute quoted by Manjoo, and I found that he was being a little less than thorough. The actual law states:
The registration of any elector identified as having changed his voting residence to a location outside his current county of registration shall not be canceled unless the registrant is sent a confirmation notice on a form prescribed by the secretary of state and the registrant fails to respond to the confirmation notice or otherwise update his registration and fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal elections subsequent to the mailing of the confirmation notice.
And
The registration of any elector identified as having changed the elector's voting residence to a location outside the elector's current county of registration shall not be canceled unless the registrant is sent a confirmation notice on a form prescribed by the secretary of state and the registrant fails to respond to the confirmation notice or otherwise update the registration and fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal elections subsequent to the mailing of the confirmation notice.
So he is ignoring that there are actually TWO requirements for the voter to purged - not having voted in the previous 2 elections AND ALSO having moved on from the previous county. And, in addition, s/he must be sent a confirmation notice, which as RFK Jr. notes, goes where? One assumes to the invalid address.
Take a guess at what proportion of voters in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County you would think fit this profile. Now check out the numbers. First, how many voters' names were purged? According to Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman,
Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, and the chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE eliminated -- with no public notice -- a staggering 175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area registration rolls. He has not explained why the revelation of this massive registration purge has been kept secret for so long. Virtually no Ohio or national media have bothered to report on this story. (2)
To put this in perspective of course, you have to look at the overall voting figures. The official vote count on Election Day for Cuyahoga County was 687,260 (3) . That means that a number equivalent to just over a quarter of the final vote tally had previously been purged. Reflect on that for a moment. If there are other legitimate explanations for why 1 in 4 of the voters of Cuyahoga County were taken off the rolls, Manjoo is not coming forward with them, and I would like to know about them, because I don't buy that the majority of are non-voting movers who don't update their address.
2. Long Lines at the Voting Booths...
First Manjoo quotes RFK Jr. ;
A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.
He chides RFK Jr. for inflating his numbers:
Kennedy cites the Democratic Party's comprehensive report on the question, so it's difficult to see where he comes up with the idea that "more than 174,000 voters" were turned away from the polls due to long lines. In fact, the DNC report -- here is the enormous PDF -- says "two percent of voters who went to the polls on Election Day decided to leave their polling locations due to the long lines. This resulted in approximately 129,543 lost votes.
Actually, it's not difficult at all to see where he comes up with that number at all, because RFK Jr., unlike the DNC's "enormous" tome, provides extensive footnotes - it's right there, on page 5. Later on the DNC does contradict itself by changing this to two percent. Choose your poison, but I don't think that's RFK Jr.'s fault.
Manjoo then uses another quote from the DNC publication to refute RFK Jr's charge that, because the long lines and shortages of voting machines were observed overwhelmingly in poorer, inner-city (and thus heavily Democratic) neighborhoods, the phenomenon served to suppress the number of votes for Kerry. His quote:
The report adds "these potential voters would have divided evenly between George Bush and John Kerry.
That's it? Surely if we go to the DNC document there will be some further explanation as to why long lines and voters getting turned away in heavily Democratic areas should miraculously not hinder us more than them? So I looked up the relevant quote (which now uses the reduced 2 percent figure that Manjoo favors):
Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio. Two (2) percent of voters who went to the polls on Election Day decided to leave their polling locations due to the long lines. This resulted in approximately 129,543 lost votes. However, these potential voters would have divided evenly between George Bush and John Kerry.
Further down comes some explanation:
Three (3) percent of voters who went to the polls left their polling places and did not return due to the long lines. Although African Americans were more likely to leave their polling places due to long lines, they were also more likely to return to vote later in the day. Thus, an equal share (3 percent) of African Americans and whites did not vote due to the long lines.
Ignoring for a second the fact that we're magically back up to 3% again, as well as the ambiguity over the extent to which the African Americans who came back later in the day managed to place their vote before the polls closed, all the DNC appears to be saying is that people of different races suffered from the long lines in approximately equal percentages. This is not the same as saying that the problems were not more pronounced in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods. Again, the DNC document, unlike RFK Jr's, is not referenced, so it's hard to dig deeper. As an aside, you have to wonder why the DNC, of all people, were so keen to refute any bias in the problem of long lines using such apparently flimsy evidence. I welcome further insight into this from all and any comers.
But in any case, there is little question that there were horrendous problems just getting into the booths on Election Day. There was a huge upswell in voter registration among Democrats in the months leading up to the election, and machine allocations were not updated to reflect this. RFK Jr. asserts that Republicans deliberately engineered it. Manjoo's response - it was all innocent incompetence:
The fact that the county once had an unbiased distribution of voting machines would seem to clear them of the kind of deliberate vote-rigging that Kennedy sees. You can call them incompetent for not responding to new registration in the county. But can you really call them election thieves?
Which seems to be saying that the un-biasing couldn't have been deliberate, because once upon a time it wasn't un-biased. Which seems to me a bit like saying that the Republicans couldn't have fixed the election, because once upon a time they didn't fix elections. Manjoo's other refutation of this particular claim by RFK Jr. is to quote William Anthony, the chairman of the board of Franklin County's election office:
Any effort to deliberately skew the vote toward Bush in Franklin would have had to involve Anthony -- and he has rejected the charge that he'd do such a thing. "I am a black man. Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?" Anthony told the Columbus Dispatch. "I've fought my whole life for people's right to vote.
And I for one have no problem believing him. But it misses the point. Anthony couldn't get the machines, because he had to deal with Kenneth Blackwell, and seemingly he just wasn't up to it. At this point it gets ugly - here are some quotes from Anthony either regarding, or specifically addressed to, Blackwell in the months preceding the election:
Franklin County and many other counties throughout the state did not have nearly enough voting machines because Ken Blackwell mismanaged the HAVA-implementation process from the start.
Boards of Elections throughout Ohio were at your mercy while waiting for your office to create and implement a coherent strategy to approve HAVA-compliant vendors and then allocate funding to counties to purchase new voting machines.
I find it particularly odious and offensive that you insist on singling me out because I am a black man. You have used my race to publicly attack me before (on a nationally broadcast program), but now I am demanding that you cease and desist.
I refuse to allow you to use me as a stalking horse to deflect criticism away from your actions as Secretary of State, especially as you attempt to court African American voters in your gubernatorial race. (4)
Doesn't quite tell the same story does it? And so my question to Mr. Manjoo would be; if you wanted to get to the truth of this matter, why would you imply in your article for Salon that the responsibility for the misallocation of voting machines fell squarely on the shoulders of William Anthony, when he was clearly and effectively blocked by a much more powerful man, Kenneth Blackwell?
3. The Exit Polls
This, of course, is where the subject of election fraud reaches high art. One doesn't have to Google too deep into this before getting lost in a statistical da Vinci Code of random variables, distributions, and Central Limit Theorems. Both our protagonists wisely steer clear of the minutiae for fear of invoking nausea in their readers. The online debate over the last 18 months on this subject has been epic, impassioned, and frequently incomprehensible to yours truly. As might be expected, RFK Jr. claim that the vast majority of exit polls differ significantly from the published totals, nearly always in favor of the incumbent, is a certain smoking gun. Manjoo counters this with quotes from 3 sources. First up is MysteryPollster, who says definitively that anyone who says that exit polls are the most reliable kind of survey..
...only demonstrates that the person making that statement knows very little about how surveys are done,
...and leaves it at that. No explanation. No specifics. The second quote also offers little satisfaction, as Warren Mitofsky, co-designer of the 2004 exit poll explains to Mr. Manjoo that:
..he doesn't think the exits represent the gospel truth of what happened during an election.
And that's all you're going to get on that one. Finally, in quoting The ACE Project, a group that advises democracies on how to conduct elections, we get a little more beef:
[exit polls'] reliability can be questionable. One might think that there is no reason why voters in stable democracies should conceal or lie about how they have voted, especially because nobody is under any obligation to answer in an exit poll. But in practice they often do. The majority of exit polls carried out in European countries over the past years have been failures.
So, of the three refutations that Mr. Manjoo chooses to quote, two have no supporting statements at all, and the third expresses an opinion primarily about European elections and (not that you would know it because his quote selection doesn't include it) primarily concerning nations in transition. This is not sufficient to convince me.
This part of Manjoo's analysis ends with a statement that is so beyond my comprehension, I fail to see how it could be anything but and error, so I'll just quote it, and let it stand by itself:
Mitofsky's final national poll put Kerry at 51 percent and Bush with 48 percent. Compare this to the actual result, which had Bush at 51 percent and Kerry with 48 percent. The difference is not that significant.
Next Mr. Manjoo tackles the margin of error of the apparent leads Kerry had in the exit polls:
What [RFK Jr.] fails to say is that in many states, the exits didn't show Kerry ahead by the margin of error, meaning, statistically, that his lead wasn't secure. Way back in December of 2004, pollster Mark Blumenthal pointed out the key fact in this debate. Of the ten battleground states that the exit poll showed Kerry winning, he ultimately lost four -- states that, you could say, cost him the election. These were Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. But in none of those states was Kerry's lead outside the poll's margin of error. In other words, the poll results showed a race that was too close to call
At which point I invoke the gods to restore some of my long lost knowledge of statistics. I don't remember much, but I do remember this - just because Kerry's lead was inside the margin of error does not mean that the race was "too close to call". The closer to the edge of the margin of error, the surer we can be of Kerry's real lead, and conversely, the chances of Bush being ahead diminish greatly. It all depends on how close to exceeding the margin of error the poll came. A lead of 1% with a 5% margin of error is not the same by any means as a lead of 4.75% with a 5% margin of error. In the first instance, you might be justified in describing it as "too close to call". In the second case, that would be a huge stretch. Manjoo's lack of specifics here leaves me somewhat suspicious.
This section of Manjoo's refutation concludes with an analysis of RFK Jr.'s criticism of Mitofsky's Reluctant Responder hypothesis, which states that the unaccounted for bias in the exit polls was due to Republicans being less likely than Democrats to answer the survey. RFK Jr. makes an initially compelling point, that in fact the total number of voters in Democrat strongholds answered the exit pollsters questions significantly LESS than the total number of voters in Republican strongholds, leading to the strong likelihood that it is the Democratic voters who were the reluctant responders. Manjoo's response:
In the Bush strongholds -- where the average completion rate was 56 percent -- it's possible that only 53 percent of those who voted for Bush were willing to be polled, while people who voted for Kerry participated at a higher 59 percent rate. Meanwhile, in the Kerry strongholds, where Mitofsky found a 53 percent average completion rate, it's possible that Bush voters participated 50 percent of the time, while Kerry voters were willing to be interviewed 56 percent of the time. In this scenario, the averages work out to the same ones Kennedy cited: a 56 percent average response rate in Bush strongholds, and a 53 percent average response rate in Kerry strongholds. But in both Bush strongholds and Kerry strongholds, Kerry voters would have been responding at a higher rate, skewing the poll toward Kerry.
The important point to note in the statement is the double use of the phrase "it's possible". It would be better to substitute "it's barely conceivable." He's operating right on the edge of statistical feasibility in order to present a situation where the actual Reluctant Responder hypothesis can barely jibe with the actual data of overall non/responders. By my albeit amateur reckoning, the chance of the opposite being true, as RFK Jr. claims, that the true Reluctant Responders were Democrats, is orders of magnitude higher. At least that's my take on it.
4. Rural Counties
I've left Manjoo's remaining refutation, regarding 150,000 votes in rural counties being switched from Kerry to Bush, to last for the simple reason that on this one I agree with him. I believe that RFK Jr.'s failure to take account of the lack of party affiliation in the Supreme Court races when using these down-ticket discrepancies to claim vote switching is a significant blunder on RFK's part.
And that's it.
References:
(1) "Update on Ohio voter purge"
By Jerome Armstrong, Sat Jul 24, 2004
http://jerome-armstrong.mydd.com/...
(2) Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman: "ELECTIONS & VOTING_Did 308,000 cancelled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in the White House?_"
http://www.onlinejournal.com/...
(3) Provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County
By Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
December 24, 2004
http://www.freepress.org/...
(4) Bob Fitrakis: The new face of apartheid: J. Kenneth Hackwell (sic)
March 30, 2006
http://www.freepress.org/...