Farhad Manjoo, Salon staff writer, debunks the Rolling Stone Ohio Stolen election article by Robert F. Kennedy in today’s Salon. Manjoo says nothing is new in Kennedy’s article, and most of his points have been proven wrong or inconclusive. The subject doesn’t interest me enough to get into the technicalities, but it was interesting to read all the Salon subscribers writing in to say that they are going to cancel their subscription for printing such right-wing drivel. The true believers on the left are as little interested in debating the evidence as the true believers on the right.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was eventually proven that the election there was stolen. It happens. It happened all the time in Chicago for the Democrats. It’s been proven, as in the New Hampshire phone jamming case, that Republicans of recent vintage do illegal things to tamper with the electoral process, and it seems pretty clear that there were serious irregularities in both Ohio and in Florida.
I think the sanest defense of what Kennedy wrote, whatever the article’s flaws, was to get the story of irregularities into print. I’m not sure Rolling Stone qualifies as a major print publication, but the story has so far as I know only been discussed on the net. Another words, it’s a first step toward getting more public attention focussed on an important issue. There’s enough smoke there to warrant more intense scrutiny.
I make no judgment about it at this point, but I resist the admonition "to get over it." This is a very big deal, and it deserves far more attention than it has been receiving. The irregularities in both Florida and Ohio need to be investigated with subpoena power, and whether these dirty tricks threw the election to Bush or not, everything should be done to prevent either party from doing any of them ever again.
There’s a lot of smoke around the Diebold voting machines as well. Again, the accusation that they’ve been hacked is one of those things that nobody has proven, because there is no way to prove it–that’s what’s so disturbing. The one thing that is known is that they are fairly easy to hack.
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