None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the Election and America's Servile Press

What actually happened in Ohio in 2004
Go to original. [2]
Harpers.org / September 7, 2005

Whichever candidate you voted for (or think you voted for), or even if you did not vote (or could not vote), you must admit that last year’s presidential race was—if nothing else—pretty interesting. True, the press has dropped the subject, and the Democrats, with very few exceptions, have “moved on.” Yet this contest may have been the most unusual in U.S. history; it was certainly among those with the strangest outcomes. You may remember being surprised yourself. The infamously factious Democrats were fiercely unified—Ralph Nader garnered only about 0.38 percent of the national vote—while the Republicans were split, with a vocal anti-Bush front that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob Barr of Georgia; Ike’s son John Eisenhower; Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William J. Crowe Jr.; former Air Force Chief of Staff and onetime “Veteran for Bush” General Merrill “Tony” McPeak; founding neocon Francis Fukuyama; Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and various large alliances of military officers, diplomats, and business professors. The American Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan, endorsed five candidates for president, including both Bush and Kerry, while the Financial Times and The Economist came out for Kerry alone. At least fifty-nine daily newspapers that backed Bush in the previous election endorsed Kerry (or no one) in this election. The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White House. [1] Yet this ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united liberals and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself—this president somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.

How did he do it? To that most important question the commentariat, briskly prompted by Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans of faith—a silent majority heretofore unmoved by any other politician—had poured forth by the millions to vote “Yes!” for Jesus’ buddy in the White House. Bush’s 51 percent, according to this thesis, were roused primarily by “family values.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called gay marriage “the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term.” The pundits eagerly pronounced their amens—“Moral values,” Tucker Carlson said on CNN, “drove President Bush and other Republican candidates to victory this week”—although it is not clear why. The primary evidence of our Great Awakening was a post-election poll by the Pew Research Center in which 27 percent of the respondents, when asked which issue “mattered most” to them in the election, selected something called “moral values.” This slight plurality of impulse becomes still less impressive when we note that, as the pollsters went to great pains to make clear, “the relative importance of moral values depends greatly on how the question is framed.” In fact, when voters were asked to “name in their own words the most important factor in their vote,” only 14 percent managed to come up with “moral values.” Strangely, this detail went little mentioned in the post-electoral commentary.[2]

The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the election—except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them. This animus appeared soon after November 2, in a spate of caustic articles dismissing any critical discussion of the outcome as crazed speculation: “Election paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged,” chuckled the Baltimore Sun on November 5. “Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed,” proclaimed the Boston Globe on November 10. “Latest Conspiracy Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether,” the Washington Post chortled on November 11. The New York Times weighed in with “Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried”—making mock not only of the “post-election theorizing” but of cyberspace itself, the fons et origo of all such loony tunes, according to the Times.

Such was the news that most Americans received. Although the tone was scientific, “realistic,” skeptical, and “middle-of-the-road,” the explanations offered by the press were weak and immaterial. It was as if they were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the fire, except to keep insisting that there was no fire.[3] Since Kerry has conceded, they argued, and since “no smoking gun” had come to light, there was no story to report. This is an oddly passive argument. Even so, the evidence that something went extremely wrong last fall is copious, and not hard to find. Much of it was noted at the time, albeit by local papers and haphazardly. Concerning the decisive contest in Ohio, the evidence is lucidly compiled in a single congressional report, which, for the last half-year, has been available to anyone inclined to read it. It is a veritable arsenal of “smoking guns”—and yet its findings may be less extraordinary than the fact that no one in this country seems to care about them.

On January 5, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio. The report was the result of a five-week investigation by the committee’s Democrats, who reviewed thousands of complaints of fraud, malfeasance, or incompetence surrounding the election in Ohio, and further thousands of complaints that poured in by phone and email as word of the inquiry spread. The congressional researchers were assisted by volunteers in Ohio who held public hearings in Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, and Cincinnati, and questioned more than two hundred witnesses. (Although they were invited, Republicans chose not to join in the inquiry.) [4]

Preserving Democracy describes three phases of Republican chicanery: the run-up to the election, the election itself, and the post-election cover-up. The wrongs exposed are not mere dirty tricks (though Bush/Cheney also went in heavily for those) but specific violations of the U.S. and Ohio constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act. Although Conyers trod carefully when the report came out, insisting that the crimes did not affect the outcome of the race (a point he had to make, he told me, “just to get a hearing”), his report does “raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said that the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone Federal requirements and constitutional standards.” The report cites “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies” throughout the state—wrongs, moreover, that were hardly random accidents. “In many cases,” the report says, “these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.”[5]

The first phase of malfeasance entailed, among many other actions, several months of bureaucratic hijinks aimed at disenfranchising Democrats, the most spectacular result of which was “a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas.” Such unequal placement had the predictable effect of slowing the voting process to a crawl at Democratic polls, while making matters quick and easy in Bush country: a clever way to cancel out the Democrats’ immense success at registering new voters in Ohio. (We cannot know the precise number of new voters registered in Ohio by either party because many states, including Ohio, do not register voters by party affiliation. The New York Times reported in September, however, that new registration rose 25 percent in Ohio’s predominantly Republican precincts and 250 percent in Ohio’s predominantly Democratic precincts.)

At Kenyon College in Gambier, for instance, there were only two machines for 1,300 would-be voters, even though “a surge of late registrations promised a record vote.” Gambier residents and Kenyon students had to stand in line for hours, in the rain and in “crowded, narrow hallways,” with some of them inevitably forced to call it quits. “In contrast, at nearby Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, which is considered more Republican leaning, there were ample waiting machines and no lines.” This was not a consequence of limited resources. In Franklin County alone, as voters stood for hours throughout Columbus and elsewhere, at least 125 machines collected dust in storage. The county’s election officials had “decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though the analysis showed that the county needs 5,000 machines.”

It seemed at times that Ohio’s secretary of state was determined to try every stunt short of levying a poll tax to suppress new voter turnout. On September 7, based on an overzealous reading of an obscure state bylaw, he ordered county boards of elections to reject all Ohio voter-registration forms not “printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text weight.” Under public pressure he reversed the order three weeks later, by which time unknown numbers of Ohioans had been disenfranchised. Blackwell also attempted to limit access to provisional ballots. The Help America Vote Act—passed in 2002 to address some of the problems of the 2000 election—prevents election officials from deciding at the polls who will be permitted to cast provisional ballots, as earlier Ohio law had permitted. On September 16, Blackwell issued a directive that somehow failed to note that change. A federal judge ordered him to revise the language, Blackwell resisted, and the court was forced to draft its own version of the directive, which it ordered Blackwell to accept, even as it noted Blackwell’s “vigorous, indeed, at times, obdurate opposition” to compliance with the law.

Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still more Democratic voters through a technique known as “caging.” The party sent registered letters to new voters, “then sought to challenge 35,000 individuals who refused to sign for the letters,” including “voters who were homeless, serving abroad, or simply did not want to sign for something concerning the Republican Party.” It should be noted that marketers have long used zip codes to target, with remarkable precision, the ethnic makeup of specific neighborhoods, and also that, according to exit polls last year, 84 percent of those black citizens who voted in Ohio voted for Kerry.[6]

The second phase of lawlessness began the Monday before the election, when Blackwell issued two directives restricting media coverage of the election. First, reporters were to be barred from the polls, because their presence contravened Ohio’s law on “loitering” near voting places. Second, media representatives conducting exit polls were to remain 100 feet away from the polls. Blackwell’s reasoning here was that, with voter turnout estimated at 73 percent, and with many new voters so blissfully ignorant as to have “never looked at a voting machine before,” his duty was clear: the public was to be protected from the “interference or intimidation” caused by “intense media scrutiny.” Both cases were at once struck down in federal court on First Amendment grounds.

Blackwell did manage to ban reporters from a post-election ballot-counting site in Warren County because—election officials claimed—the FBI had warned of an impending terrorist attack there. The FBI said it issued no such warning, however, and the officials refused to name the agent who alerted them. Moreover, as the Cincinnati Enquirer later reported, email correspondence between election officials and the county’s building services director indicated that lockdown plans—“down to the wording of the signs that would be posted on the locked doors”—had been in the works for at least a week. Beyond suggesting that officials had something to hide, the ban was also, according to the report, a violation of Ohio law and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Contrary to a prior understanding, Blackwell also kept foreign monitors away from the Ohio polls. Having been formally invited by the State Department on June 9, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an international consortium based in Vienna, had come to witness and report on the election. The mission’s two-man teams had been approved to monitor the process in eleven states—but the observers in Ohio were prevented from watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases, the election itself. “We thought we could be at the polling places before, during, and after” the voting, said Søren Søndergaard, a Danish member of the team. Denied admission to polls in Columbus, he and his partner went to Blackwell, who refused them letters of approval, again citing Ohio law banning “loitering” outside the polls. The two observers therefore had to “monitor” the voting at a distance of 100 feet from each polling place. Although not technically illegal, Blackwell’s refusal was improper and, of course, suspicious. (The Conyers report does not deal with this episode.)

To what end would election officials risk so malodorous an action? We can only guess, of course. We do know, however, that Ohio, like the nation, was the site of numerous statistical anomalies—so many that the number is itself statistically anomalous, since every single one of them took votes from Kerry. In Butler County the Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court took in 5,347 more votes than Kerry did. In Cuyahoga County ten Cleveland precincts “reported an incredibly high number of votes for third party candidates who have historically received only a handful of votes from these urban areas”—mystery votes that would mostly otherwise have gone to Kerry. In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer, and, in Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In Perry County the number of Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered voters, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent. Youngstown, perhaps to make up the difference, reported negative 25 million votes.

In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast, as in West Palm Beach back in 2000. In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for president—representing nearly 7 percent of the electorate—mysteriously dropped out of the final count. The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas County kept going haywire, prompting the county’s election director to admit that prior tests of the machines had failed. One polling place in Lucas County never opened because all the machines were locked up somewhere and no one had the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because county workers, in taking Ralph Nader’s name off many ballots, also happened to remove John Kerry’s name. The Washington Post reported that in Mahoning County “25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column,” but it did not think to ask why.

Ohio Democrats also were heavily thwarted through dirty tricks recalling Richard Nixon’s reign and the systematic bullying of Dixie. There were “literally thousands upon thousands” of such incidents, the Conyers report notes, cataloguing only the grossest cases. Voters were told, falsely, that their polling place had changed; the news was conveyed by phone calls, “door-hangers,” and even party workers going door to door. There were phone calls and fake “voter bulletins” instructing Democrats that they were not to cast their votes until Wednesday, November 3, the day after Election Day. Unknown “volunteers” in Cleveland showed up at the homes of Democrats, kindly offering to “deliver” completed absentee ballots to the election office. And at several polling places, election personnel or hired goons bused in to do the job “challenged” voters—black voters in particular—to produce documents confirming their eligibility to vote. The report notes one especially striking incident:

In Franklin County, a worker at a Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people who called themselves the “Texas Strike Force” using payphones to make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system. The “Texas Strike Force” paid their way to Ohio, but their hotel accommodations were paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose headquarters is across the street. The hotel worker heard one caller threaten a likely voter with being reported to the FBI and returning to jail if he voted. Another hotel worker called the police, who came but did nothing.

The electoral fraud continued past Election Day, but by means far more complex and less apparent than the bullying that marked the day itself. Here the aim was to protect the spoils, which required the prevention of countywide hand recounts by any means necessary. The procedure for recounts is quite clear. In fact, it was created by Blackwell. A recount having been approved, each of the state’s eighty-eight counties must select a number of precincts randomly, so that the total of their ballots comes to 3 percent (at least) of the county’s total vote. Those ballots must then be simultaneously hand counted and machine counted. If the hand count and the new machine count match, the remaining 97 percent of the selected ballots may be counted by machine. If, however, the totals vary by as little as a single vote, all the other votes must be hand counted, and the results, once reconfirmed, must be accepted as the new official total.

The Ohio recount officially started on December 13—five days after Conyers’s hearings opened—and was scheduled to go on until December 28. Because the recount (such as it was) coincided with the inquiry, Conyers was able to discover, and reveal in his report, several instances of what seemed to be electoral fraud.

On December 13, for instance, Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, filed an affidavit stating that the computer that operates the tabulating machine had been “modified” by one Michael Barbian Jr., an employee of Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of the county’s voting machinery.

Ms. Eaton witnessed Mr. Barbian modify the Hocking County computer vote tabulator before the announcement of the Ohio recount. She further witnessed Barbian, upon the announcement that the Hocking County precinct was planned to be the subject of the initial Ohio test recount, make further alterations based on his knowledge of the situation. She also has firsthand knowledge that Barbian advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine count.[7]

The committee also learned that Triad similarly intervened in at least two other counties. In a filmed interview, Barbian said that he had examined machines not only in Hocking County but also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties; his purpose was to provide the Board of Elections with as much information as possible—“The more information you give someone,” he said, “the better job they can do.” The report concludes that such information as Barbian and his colleagues could provide was helpful indeed:

Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law—to randomly ascertain if the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if not to conduct a full hand recount.

The report notes Triad’s role in several other cases. In Union County the hard drive on one tabulator was replaced after the election. (The old one had to be subpoenaed.) In Monroe County, after the 3 percent hand count had twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new machine and took away the old one. (That machine’s count matched the hand count.) Such operations are especially worrying in light of the fact that Triad’s founder, Brett A. Rapp, “has been a consistent contributor to Republican causes.” (Neither Barbian nor Rapp would respond to Harper’s queries, and the operator at Triad refused even to provide the name of a press liaison.)

There were many cases of malfeasance, however, in which Triad played no role. Some 1,300 Libertarian and Green Party volunteers, led by Green Party recount manager Lynne Serpe, monitored the count throughout Ohio.[8] They reported that: In Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and Medina counties, the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount were preselected, not picked at random, as the law requires. In Fairfield County the 3 percent hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the machine count—but despite protests from observers, officials did not then perform a hand recount of all the ballots, as the law requires. In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered, apparently to ensure that the hand recount would equal the machine count. In Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or stored. Belmont County “hired an independent programmer (‘at great expense’) to reprogram the counting machines so that they would only count votes for President during the recount.” Finally, Democratic and/or Green observers were denied access to absentee, and/or provisional ballots, or were not allowed to monitor the recount process, in Summit, Huron, Putnam, Allen, Holmes, Mahoning, Licking, Stark, Medina, Warren, and Morgan counties. In short, the Ohio vote was never properly recounted, as required by Ohio law.

That is what the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee found, that is what they distributed to everyone in Congress, and that is what any member of the national press could have reported at any time in the last half year. Conyers may or may not have precisely captured every single dirty trick. The combined votes gained by the Republicans through such devices may or may not have decided the election. (Bush won Ohio by 118,601 votes.) Indeed, if you could somehow look into the heart of every eligible voter in the United States to know his or her truest wishes, you might discover that Bush/Cheney was indeed the people’s choice. But you have to admit—the report is pretty interesting.

In fact, its release was timed for maximum publicity. According to the United States Code (Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 15), the President of the Senate—i.e., the U.S. Vice President—must announce each state’s electoral results, then “call for objections.” Objections must be made in writing and “signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives.” A challenge having been submitted, the joint proceedings must then be suspended so that both houses can retire to their respective chambers to decide the question, after which they reconvene and either certify or reject the vote.

Thus was an unprecedented civic drama looming on the day that Conyers’s report appeared. First of all, electoral votes had been contested in the Congress only twice. In 1877 the electoral votes of several states were challenged, some by Democrats supporting Samuel Tilden, others by Republicans supporting Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1969, Republicans challenged the North Carolina vote when Lloyd W. Bailey, a “faithless elector” pledged to Richard Nixon for that state, voted for George Wallace.[9] And a new challenge would be more than just “historic.” Because of what had happened—or not happened—four years earlier, it would also be extraordinarily suspenseful. On January 6, 2001, House Democrats, galvanized by the electoral larceny in Florida, tried and failed to challenge the results. Their effort was aborted by the failure of a single Democratic senator to join them, as the law requires. Al Gore—still vice president, and therefore still the Senate’s president—had urged Democrats to make no such unseemly waves but to respect Bush’s installation for the sake of national unity. Now, it seemed, that partisan disgrace would be redressed, at least symbolically; for a new challenge from the House, by Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, would be co-signed by Barbara Boxer, Democratic senator from California, who, at a noon press conference on January 6, heightened the suspense by tearfully acknowledging her prior wrong: “Four years ago I didn’t intervene. I was asked by Al Gore not to do so and I didn’t do so. Frankly, looking back on it, I wish I had.”

It was a story perfect for TV—a rare event, like the return of Halley’s comet; a scene of high contention in the nation’s capital; a heroine resolved to make things right, both for the public and herself. Such big news would highlight Conyers’s report, whose findings, having spurred the challenge in the first place, would now inform the great congressional debate on the election in Ohio.

As you may recall, this didn’t happen—the challenge was rejected by a vote of 267?31 in the House and 74?1 in the Senate. The Boston Globe gave the report 118 words (page 3); the Los Angeles Times, 60 words (page 18). It made no news in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, or U.S. News & World Report. It made no news on CBS, NBC, ABC, or PBS. Nor did NPR report it (though Talk of the Nation dealt with it on January 6). CNN did not report it, though Donna Brazile pointedly affirmed its copious “evidence” on Inside Politics on January 6. (Judy Woodruff failed to pause for an elaboration.) Also on that date, the Fox News Channel briefly showed Conyers himself discussing “irregularities” in Franklin County, though it did not mention the report. He was followed by Tom DeLay, who assailed the Democrats for their “assault against the institutions of our representative democracy.” The New York Times negated both the challenge and the document in a brief item headlined “Election Results to Be Certified, with Little Fuss from Kerry,” which ran on page 16 and ended with this quote from Dennis Hastert’s office, vis-à-vis the Democrats: “They are really just trying to stir up their loony left.”

Indeed, according to the House Republicans, it was the Democrats who were the troublemakers and cynical manipulators—spinning “fantasies” and “conspiracy theories” to “distract” the people, “poison the atmosphere of the House of Representatives” (Dave Hobson, R., Ohio), and “undermine the prospect of democracy” (David Dreier, R., Calif.); mounting “a direct attack to undermine our democracy” (Tom DeLay, R., Tex.), “an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy” (DeLay); trying “to plant the insidious seeds of doubt in the electoral process” (J. D. Hayworth, R., Ariz.); and in so doing following “their party’s primary strategy: to obstruct, to divide and to destroy” (Deborah D. Pryce, R., Ohio).

Furthermore, the argument went, there was no evidence of electoral fraud. The Democrats were using “baseless and meritless tactics” (Pryce) to present their “so-called evidence” (Bob Ney, R., Ohio), “making allegations that have no basis of fact” (Candice Miller, R., Mich.), making claims for which “there is no evidence whatsoever, no evidence whatsoever” (Dreier). “There is absolutely no credible basis to question the outcome of the election” (Rob Portman, R., Ohio). “No proven allegations of fraud. No reports of widespread wrongdoing. It was, at the end of the day, an honest election” (Bill Shuster, R., Pa.). And so on. Bush won Ohio by “an overwhelming and comfortable margin,” Rep. Pryce insisted, while Ric Keller (R., Fla.) said that Bush won by “an overwhelmingly comfortable margin.” (“The president’s margin is significant,” observed Roy Blunt, R., Mo.) In short, as Tom DeLay put it, “no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004—and, for that matter, the election of 2000. Everybody knows it. The voters know it, the candidates know it, the courts know it, and the evidence proves it.”

That all this commentary was simply wrong went unnoticed and/or unreported. Once Bush was re-inaugurated, all inquiries were apparently concluded, and the story was officially kaput. By March talk of fraud was calling forth the same reflexive ridicule that had prevailed back in November—but only now and then, on those rare moments when somebody dared bring it up: “Also tonight,” CNN’s Lou Dobbs deadpanned ironically on March 8, “Teresa Heinz Kerry still can’t accept certain reality. She suggests the presidential election may have been rigged!” And when, on March 31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal.[10] The article included this response from Carlo LoParo, Kenneth Blackwell’s spokesman: “What are you going to do except laugh at it?”

In the summer of 2003, Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.) was interviewed by Alexandra Pelosi at a barbecue on the White House lawn for her HBO documentary Diary of a Political Tourist. “It’s already over. The election’s over. We won,” King exulted more than a year before the election. When asked by Pelosi—the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—how he knew that Bush would win, he answered, “It’s all over but the counting. And we’ll take care of the counting.”

King, who is well known in Washington for his eccentric utterances, says he was kidding, that he has known Pelosi for years, that she is “a clown,” and that her project was a “spoof.” Still, he said it. And laughter, despite the counsel of Kenneth Blackwell’s press flack, seems an inappropriate response to the prospect of a stolen election—as does the advice that we “get over it.” The point of the Conyers report, and of this report as well, is not to send Bush packing and put Kerry in his place. The Framers could no more conceive of electoral fraud on such a scale than they could picture Fox News Channel or the Pentagon; and so we have no constitutional recourse, should it be proven, finally, that the wrong guy “won.” The point of our revisiting the last election, rather, is to see exactly what the damage was so that the people can demand appropriate reforms. Those who say we should “move on” from that suspicious race and work instead on “bigger issues”—like electoral reform—are urging the impossible; for there has never been a great reform that was not driven by some major scandal.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” Thomas Jefferson said, “it expects what never was and never will be.” That much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since “the news” has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove’s fevered dreams. Just as 2+2=5 in Orwell’s Oceania, so here today the United States just won two brilliant military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented, we live in a democracy (like the Iraqis), and last year’s presidential race “was, at the end of the day, an honest election.” Such claims, presented as the truth, are nothing but faith-based reiteration, as valid as the notions that one chooses to be homosexual, that condoms don’t prevent the spread of HIV, and that the universe was made 6,000 years ago.

In this nation’s epic struggle on behalf of freedom, reason, and democracy, the press has unilaterally disarmed—and therefore many good Americans, both liberal and conservative, have lost faith in the promise of self-government. That vast surrender is demoralizing, certainly, but if we face it, and endeavor to reverse it, it will not prove fatal. This democracy can survive a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to, or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded.
About the Author

Mark Crispin Miller is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon and, most recently, Cruel and Unusual. His next book, Fooled Again, will be published this fall by Basic Books.
Notes

1.The print version of “None Dare Call It Stolen” contained the following line, which was incorrect: “on Election Day, twenty-six state exit polls incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry.” The correct number was five states. Although we regret the error, the context surrounding it bears further explanation.

The mistake was brought to our attention by a letter from Warren Mitofsky, founder of Mitofsky International, which, along with partner Edison Media Research, has conducted exit polls of every presidential contest since 1996. In the letter, Mr. Mitofsky stated that not only was the figure for twenty-six states incorrect, so, too, was the assertion that Edison/Mitofsky's exit polling contained any mistakes whatsoever. “One hundred-twenty-three races for President, Senator, Governor, and propositions,” Mr. Mitofsky wrote, “were called without error.” He further attributed our misstep to “confusing the reports by bloggers with the exit poll my partner and I did.”

Perhaps. But a closer inspection of what Mr. Mitofsky actually means by “called without error” could indicate otherwise. On January 19, 2005, Edison/Mitofsky released a report that, while continuing to maintain that no election projection mistakes were made, did acknowledge the existence of serious “differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count.” In thirty states, the voter estimates produced by Edison/Mitofsky data was wrong to a statistically significant degree (twenty-six states for Kerry, four for Bush). Our mistake came in failing to recognize that in twenty-one of the twenty-six instances in which the estimates incorrectly named Kerry as the front-runner, he ultimately carried the state, only by a smaller margin than indicated by the exit polls. Still, an apparent logical disconnect would seem to exist. How could the estimates be wrong but not the final projection? To answer this question, a clear picture of the difference between estimates and final projections is needed.

On Election Day, exit poll interviewers submit their results to Edison/Mitofsky three times, during regularly scheduled “calls,” the last of which comes shortly before the close of the polls. These results do not contain official vote numbers, which is important. Many people would assume that Edison/Mitofsky's final projections exclusively utilize the information collected at the polls and sent in during the calls; however, this is not the process. Edison/Mitofsky's report makes clear that it does not “rely solely on exit polls in its computations and estimates.” When the voting is complete, actual vote numbers are combined with the exit poll responses and “as in past elections, the final exit poll data used for analysis . . . [is] adjusted to match the actual vote returns.” So, even if the exit poll estimates are erroneous, Edison/Mitofsky still isn't wrong-because they just add in the actual vote numbers to ensure everything checks.

This practice is by no means secret, although perhaps the average voter or election-night network-television watcher might not have been aware of it. I certainly wasn't. Maybe knowing this should serve to highlight the risks of viewing exit polls as a hedge against improprieties in the vote count. Or perhaps that is precisely the best use for them. The chances that the state exit poll estimates erred by such a wide margin was one 1 in 16.5 million, according to a study by the National Election Data Archive Project. One final key point remains: of the five states Edison/Mitofsky had Kerry leading that he eventually lost, Ohio was one. —
Theodore Ross
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2. Another poll, by Zogby International, showed that 33 percent of voters deemed “greed and materialism” the most pressing moral problems in America. Only 12 percent of those polled cited gay marriage. [Back]

3. Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, stood out as an heroic exception, devoting many segments of his nightly program Countdown to the myriad signs of electoral mischief, particularly in Ohio. [Back]

4.

The full report can be downloaded from the Judiciary Committee’s website at www.house.gov/judiciary_ democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf and is also, as of May, available as a trade paperback, entitled What Went Wrong in Ohio. I should note here that, in a victory for family values, the publishers of that paperback are my parents, Jordan and Anita Miller.
[Back]

5. When contacted by Harper’s Magazine, Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo dismissed Conyers’s report as a partisan attack. “Why wasn’t it more than an hour’s story?” he asked, referring to the lack of media interest in the report. “Everybody can’t be wrong, can they?” [Back]

6. Let it not be said that the Democrats rose wholly above the electoral fray: in Defiance County, Ohio, one Chad Staton was arrested on 130 counts of vote fraud when he submitted voter-registration forms purportedly signed by, among others, Dick Tracy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Michael Jackson, and Mary Poppins. Of course, depending on party affiliation, the consequence of election misdeeds varies. Staton, who told police he was paid in crack for each registration, received fifty-four months in jail for his fifth-degree felonies; Blackwell, for his part, is now the G.O.P. front-runner for governor of Ohio. [Back]

7. In May 2005, Eaton was ordered by the Hocking County Board of Elections to resign from her position. [Back]

8. The recount itself was the result of a joint application from the Green and Libertarian parties. [Back]

9. Offended by the president-elect’s first cabinet appointments (Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, et al.), Bailey was protesting Nixon’s liberalism. [Back]

10. On the other hand, the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com, MSNBC, and ABC (which devoted a Nightline segment to the “conspiracy theory” that the exit polls had been correct). [Back]
This is None Dare Call It Stolen, originally from August 2005, published Wednesday, September 7, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

Some Might Call It Treason: An Open Letter to Salon

Huffington Post / June 16, 2006

Two weeks ago, Rolling Stone came out with "Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?" -- a masterful investigative piece by Robert Kennedy, Jr., arguing that Bush & Co. stole their "re-election" in Ohio, and pointing out exactly how they did it. Primarily because of Kennedy's good reputation, and the mainstream credibility of Rolling Stone, the article has finally opened many eyes that had been tightly shut to the grave state of American democracy.

One week after Kennedy's article appeared, Salon posted an attack upon it by Farhad Manjoo, the magazine's technology reporter. That piece contained so many errors of fact and logic, and was throughout so brazenly wrong-headed, that several hundred readers sent in angry letters, many of them brilliantly refuting some of Manjoo's misconceptions and mistakes, and quite a few demanding that Salon cancel their subscriptions.

A few days later, Joan Walsh, Salon's editor, tried to calm the storm with a defense of Manjoo's writings on the theft of the 2004 election -- a theft that he had frequently addressed before, as he had been trying to "debunk"it ever since that infamous Election Day. Walsh did not answer any of the criticisms of Manjoo's attack, but merely re-asserted Salon's confidence in all his work for them.

At this point I decided to reply, both to Manjoo's piece (which, as I note below, had wrongly used my own work on election fraud to further slander Kennedy's) and to Joan Walsh's apologia. My point was not just to pile on (there was no need for that), but to attempt an explanation as to why so many reasonable people -- many of them self-described "progressives" -- keep refusing to perceive the copious and ever-growing evidence that this regime has never been elected. It was my hope that Salon might at least consider moderating its position on election fraud, which now demands more serious treatment than the magazine has thus far given it.

I sent the letter to Salon on Tuesday. June 13. Two days later, I received an email from them telling me that they would not be posting it. "In terms of the Ohio election fraud issue," wrote Jeanne Carstensen, "we don't feel your letter, as passionately argued as it is, adds anything substantially new to the debate, which we've covered the hell out of already." I believe that that assertion too is wrong, and that the issues here are far too grave for "the debate" to be thus prematurely halted; and so I'm very pleased that HuffPost has agreed to run my e-mail as an open letter.

Dear Joan,

I'd like to thank Salon for touching off this spirited debate on Farhad Manjoo's argument with Robert Kennedy, Jr., and also want to thank you in particular for your own personal defense of Manjoo's writings on election fraud. I am especially impressed by your desire "to place this debate in its proper political context." Such careful explanation is exactly what we need; and so I'd like to help shed just a bit more light upon that context, by clarifying the record as you have described it.

In defense of Manjoo's writings since Election Day 2004, you claim (just as he has often claimed) that Salon cares tremendously about the problem of election fraud, and always has: "Salon has aggressively covered Republican efforts to suppress Democratic voter participation going back to December 2000," and has "followed the story doggedly ever since." In 2002, you claim, "Manjoo expanded Salon's coverage of our flawed election system with a special focus on the problems with electronic voting." Since then, you write, "[h]e has approached his stories on the massive problems with voting in this country in the same way, with an open mind." In his zealous drive to learn the truth, you say, "he did not find evidence" of any widespread fraud in Georgia in 2002 (where Democrat Max Cleland lost his Senate seat, surprisingly, to Saxby Chambliss, and Democrat Roy Barnes was, also surprisingly, ousted as governor by Sonny Perdue). And, two years later, you remind us, Manjoo found nothing to confirm the view that fraud decided Bush's re-election in Ohio.

And so Salon has, for the last six years, been searching earnestly for "evidence" of fraud, and finding nothing but "unproven charges." If I may say so, this version of your history is not credible. First of all, it begs the question -- for there is vast evidence of fraud, as the letters you've received make wholly clear. Certainly you have the right to keep insisting that there is no evidence, and Manjoo certainly has every right to quibble with whichever single claim he may perceive as bogus or exaggerated. Neither move per se, however, can negate the copious, precise and ever-growing evidence of massive fraud in 2004, any more than the tobacco companies could negate the evidence that cigarettes are lethal, or the US religious right suppress the evidence of natural selection, or of global warming. As it's the evidence that matters above all, Salon's readers ought to be encouraged to study it themselves, and not accept mere claims about it, whether yours or mine.

So let me move beyond that fundamental argument, and make a more specific criticism of your recent statement in defense of Salon's treatment of election fraud. That statement obscures the fact that Manjoo's attitude toward his subject -- and, therefore, Salon's position -- has been strangely inconsistent. On the one hand, you are surely right to say that he has done some excellent reporting on the looming danger of election fraud -- before Nov. 2 of that fateful year. Back then he did a fine job covering several sinister developments, including the shenanigans of Nathan Sproul, a theocratic activist whose firm, Sproul & Associates, conducted bogus voter-registration drives in at least six states, covertly registering people as Republicans without their knowledge, and often trashing forms filled out by Democrats. (As I point out in Fooled Again, my book on the 2004 election, SEC records suggest that Sproul may also have abetted the subversion of the recount in Ohio.) In fact, I thought so highly of Manjoo's reporting pre-Election Day that I was often guided by it in my own research for Fooled Again, and therefore even thanked him warmly in the book's acknowledgments (p. 349). Considering such trenchant work throughout the presidential race, it seemed, to say the least, quite odd that Manjoo suddenly and absolutely shifted ground as soon as Bush's unexpected victory was official. Where he had indeed been dogged and impartial in exposing some real threats to the integrity of the election, ex post facto he seemed far less interested in dealing with the evidence of GOP malfeasance than in jeering every effort to discuss it. Instead of careful scrutiny of that evidence, he resorted mainly to sarcastic hooting and ad hominem assault -- the same tactics that the Bush Republicans themselves have always used to cast all argument about their unexpected win as sheer insanity.

That is what Manjoo did in his review of Fooled Again, accusing me of "fraud," "pseudo-journalism," lying and venality. (My reply to that piece is here.) In his attack on Robert Kennedy's article he has done the same thing once again -- trashing Kennedy's motives, and accusing him, essentially, of plagiarism: "Nothing here is new. If you've ... read Mark Crispin Miller's 'Fooled Again,' you're already familiar with everything Kennedy has to say." That claim is quite false. Kennedy and Rolling Stone have given us a shattering new view of the Ohio travesty, based both on prodigious journalistic synthesis and remarkable firsthand research. Its interviews alone -- especially with Lou Harris, the polling eminence, who deems Ohio stolen by Bush/Cheney -- are, or ought to be, big news. While I am proud to say that Kennedy considers Fooled Again a major inspiration, I cannot claim that he derived much information from my book. His focus is entirely on Ohio, whereas Fooled Again devotes only some 15 pages (out of 350) to the crimes and improprieties committed in that state. My book deals with the election fraud committed nationwide in 2004 -- as Manjoo knows. Why, then, would he say that Kennedy had cribbed it all from me? Far from wanting Salon's readers to assess the evidence themselves, he seems to want people not even to know about it -- certainly a strange objective for a writer with "an open mind."

What explains this eagerness to kill all conversation on an issue of such grave importance? This is not a question just about Farhad Manjoo and/or Salon, because your way of dealing, or not dealing, with this all-important matter has been typical of the entire US political establishment throughout Bush/Cheney's reign. This general silence has prevented us from facing an enormous threat to our democracy, which is now at unprecedented risk. We might start to illuminate this problem by doing now exactly what you claim you want to do: "place this debate in its proper political context." Let us therefore reconsider your reporter's violent post-election U-turn, which had him all at once reflexively deriding the very story that he had himself been very capably reporting.

What Manjoo did after Election Day was simply gallop off into the journalistic herd as it went thundering rightward, parroting the Bush machine's own talking points. According to Ken Blackwell, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove and others, the election was a simple slam dunk for the president, however many and astounding the anomalies, and even if the numbers actually did not add up, or the official explanation ("family values") make a lick of sense; and anybody who suggested otherwise was, a priori, a "sore loser" and/or "paranoid," a "moonbat" venting mere "conspiracy theory," etc. "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004," said Tom DeLay. "It was, at the end of the day, an honest election," said Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA). Between such propaganda and the post-election coverage in the US press there was no difference whatsoever. With the heroic exception of Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, right after Election Day the mainstream press re-echoed the Republican barrage with groundless catcalls of its own. "Election paranoia surfaces; Conspiracy theorists call results rigged," laughed the Baltimore Sun; "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed," chuckled the Boston Globe; "Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether," the Washington Post giggled; and the New York Times was most derisive of them all, with a broadside -- "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried" -- that mocked not just the rampant "theories" of election fraud but cyberspace itself, with its "Web log hysteria," "on-line market of dark ideas," and "breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out," etc.

Such was the consensus that Manjoo too suddenly embraced, thereby bringing Salon fully into line with all the corporate media; nor was Manjoo's a lonely voice in the progressive media, which also either laughed off or ignored the evidence of fraud. No left/liberal publication, whether on- or off-line, focused on that evidence, nor did the story make a national splash on leftist radio, nor, aside from John Conyers and Jesse Jackson, did any lefty media stars take up the cause. By and large, the left press based its blithe dismissals of the issue not on any careful sifting of that evidence but on the mere say-so of certain politicians. Mother Jones ran a piece by Mark Hertsgaard, purporting to debunk the "theory" that Bush/Cheney stole Ohio. For evidence Hertsgaard relied on the assurances of various Ohio Democrats, who swore to him that there had been no fraud. Posting on TomPaine.com, Russ Baker likewise mocked the widespread "theories" of election fraud, on the basis of a brief trip to Ohio where he also talked to Democrats who swore to him that there had been no fraud. Once Election Day was past, The Nation also, like Salon, at once forgot its pre-election coverage of impending problems -- in particular, a powerful overview by Ronnie Dugger -- and simply dropped the subject, other than to ridicule the "theory" that Ohio had been stolen; David Corn, for instance, took that line, basing it on what he'd heard from certain Democrats who swore to him that there had been no fraud. And when we look back at the corporate media's non-coverage of this crucial story, we find that the consensus came not only from the bellicose Republicans, but also from those Democrats who swore repeatedly that there had been no fraud.

On the other hand, those maverick Democrats who had seen evidence of fraud, and who were keen to publicize it -- Conyers, Jackson, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and others -- weren't consulted by the press, which largely snubbed those activists and statisticians who had studied the election fraud in depth. (Robert Koehler of Tribune News Services was a heroic exception.) Thus the media, both corporate and left/liberal, favored only those who genuflected at the party line, which both parties were assiduously toeing. According to the journalistic groupthink, any Democrat who duly exculpated the Republicans was necessarily (a) well informed about what really happened on Election Day, and (b) being completely honest, on the record. In fact, some of those Democrats were clueless, or reluctant to go public with the truth. For instance, Bill Anthony, the Democratic chair of Franklin County's Board of Elections, has quietly contradicted what he said both to Manjoo and Baker, telling Bob Fitrakis, on the record, that he does believe Bush/Cheney stole Ohio, largely by fiddling with the numbers in the rural counties in the state's Southwest (a major vote-theft, as Kennedy explains in Rolling Stone). On the issue of election fraud, the Democrats observed the code of omerta. In Who Counts?, Dorothy Fadiman's forthcoming documentary on Republican election fraud, Bob Hagan, a Democratic state senator from Youngstown, tells of having had his own e-vote for Kerry flip to Bush -- a glitch that wiped out Kerry votes throughout Ohio (and at least a dozen other states), and yet the Democrats told Hagan not to mention it: "The Kerry campaign said, 'Leave it alone. Don't talk about it. It's not something we want to get out.'"

So much for the democratic spirit of the Democratic Party, which, in burying the most important civic issue of our time, has been just as complicit as the GOP, although they cloud the issue far less rudely. Take "Democracy at Risk," the DNC report on the election in Ohio, which came out in the summer of 2005. The document appears to be a very damning study of Republican malfeasance in Ohio. It offers many harrowing statistics, and some strong firsthand accounts, of Democratic disenfranchisement throughout the state -- only to deny that fraud had anything to do with it. The problem, rather, was "incompetence," which was somehow epidemic in Ohio on Election Day, and which, stranger still, invariably helped Bush/Cheney and hurt Kerry/Edwards. The report is not exactly readable, with long abstruse equations covering page after page -- a haze of math that does not quite conceal the bald self-contradictions that distort the document like heavy cracks across a windshield. For instance, the report confirms, in various ways, that there were far too few machines only in Democratic precincts, while the number of machines in GOP strongholds was more than adequate. Then, out of nowhere, toward the end, we're told that members of both parties were affected equally by the statewide shortage of machines, so that the glitch did not, of course, affect the outcome of the race.

The whole report is twisted thus, the authors tortuously bending over backward to assure us that DeLay et al. were right: "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004." If we look deeper into the report (and also read the pertinent exposés by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at freepress.org), we find that it is less an earnest study of the fraud committed in Ohio than a political statement, meant primarily to distance the committee, and the party, from John Conyers and those other Democrats who had been so tactless as to harp on the abundant evidence of systematic fraud by the Republicans. This fact is highly relevant to Manjoo's attack on Robert Kennedy, as Manjoo's case is heavily dependent on the DNC report. Manjoo invokes it several times, accusing Kennedy of quoting only certain parts of it and pointedly ignoring all those later parts that clear the GOP of fraud. Your reporter calls this a "deliberate omission of key bits of data." And yet that charge is groundless, as the DNC report is only partly accurate, and Kennedy, quite rightly, quoted only its sound figures and ignored its weird exculpatory spin.

The DNC report is typical of that cowed, calculating party, whose managers consistently deny the evidence of fraud, even though the consequence is their assured political castration. Why exactly would they take that suicidal course? The reasons generally given for their silence on the subject are preposterous on their face. Kerry won't discuss the issue frankly on the record, we've been told, because he's worried that the media will smack him for it. ("They're saying that, if I don't concede, they'll call us sore losers!" he reportedly said to a stunned John Edwards just before he called it quits the morning after.) That may be what Kerry, among others, actually believes, but it's absurd, as no amount of public scorn, however withering, could ever be as frightening to a democratic politician as the twilight of democracy itself.

We also hear that Democrats have been reluctant to speak out about election fraud because they fear that doing so might cut down voter turnout on Election Day. By such logic, we should henceforth utter not a peep about election fraud, so that the Democratic turnout will break records. Then, when the Republicans win yet again, because they've rigged the system, how will all those Democratic voters feel? Maybe those who haven't killed themselves, or fled the country, will recover just enough to vote again. Would it then be prudent for the Democrats to talk about election fraud? Or would it still seem sensible to keep the subject under wraps?

The argument is idiotic, yet the people who have seriously made it -- Bernie Sanders, Markos Moulitsas, Hillary Clinton's and Chuck Schumer's people, among others -- are extremely bright. The argument, as foolish as it is, does not bespeak a low I.Q., but, I would suggest, a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth. The Democrats refuse to talk about election fraud because they cannot, will not, wrap their minds around the implications of what happened in 2004, and what is happening right now, and what will keep on happening until we, as a people, face the issue. In short, whatever clever-sounding rationales they may invoke (no doubt in all sincerity), the Democrats won't talk about election fraud because they're in denial, which is itself based on a lethal combination of inertia, self-interest and, above all -- or below all -- fear.

Such fear is understandable. For the problem here is not simply mechanical or technological, legal or bureaucratic, requiring that we merely tweak the rules and/or build a better mousetrap. Any such expedient will naturally depend on a consensus of "both sides" -- and there's the rub, because in this great clash the "other side" detests American democracy itself. The movement now in power is not conservative but radical, intent on an apocalyptic program that is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, on which, lest we forget, this revolutionary secular republic was first founded. The movement frankly disbelieves in reason, and in all the other worldly goods that every rational American still takes for granted: pluralism, checks and balances, "the general welfare," freedom, progress, the pursuit of happiness. For this movement, condom use is worse than death by AIDS, however many millions the disease may kill; the ruination of the planet should be hastened, not prevented, as it means that He will be returning soon; the "war on terror" is a matter not of geopolitics but metaphysics, as our national enemy is "a guy named Satan"; homosexuals should not be citizens, the US having been conceived as a "Christian republic"; and -- most relevant to this debate -- the movement's adversaries, which means all the rest of us, are not human beings with divergent interests but literal "agents of Hell," demonic entities against which any tactic, however criminal or sinful, is permissible, because they are likely to use any tactic, regardless of its sinfulness or criminality, to force their evil program on the Righteous Ones.

Of course, that theocratic bloc does not comprise the whole Bush/Cheney movement, which, at the top, is heavily dominated too by frank neo-imperialists, corporate profiteers, careerist sociopaths and livid paranoids compelled by the intense self-hatred typical of such perennial types as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Revolution tends to work by unifying the energies, or bile, of only roughly complementary interests. This revolution certainly is no pure upsurge of religious fervor, for its plutocratic animus is just as powerful, apparently, as its crusade to "Christianize" the world. However, while it would be very foolish to ignore the movement's secular agenda (i.e., the avarice and power lust of Cheney/Rumsfeld and their corporate cronies), it is just as foolish to imagine that the movement's theocratic program is mere smoke, calculated just to daze the pious masses so that Congress and Wall Street can rob them blind.

This theocratic program is no secret, as the conquest of the GOP has been the top priority of US Christianist extremists since the early Nineties. It was their aim to put George W. Bush in office, and then to keep him there, despite the will of the electorate; and having done so, they have rapidly transformed our government into an instrument of their crusade. "George W. Bush is our agenda!" as the Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition, boasted candidly to Salon's Michelle Goldberg a few years ago. He had every right to crow. The executive departments and top federal agencies are now in theocratic hands, and this government pursues no policy, foreign or domestic, that has not been devised or vetted by the party's theocratic apparat. The government now generously subsidizes many theocratic groups that proselytize explicitly, pushing both their own creed and the interests of the Bush Republicans. And now that Congress too is full of theocratic militants (who seem to have no strong opponents), the Supreme Court is just one seat away from an entrenched majority as frankly hostile to the church/state separation as it is to voting rights for all Americans.

The power and fury of the US theocratic movement have been amply documented by a range of keen observers, including Esther Kaplan, Paul Craig Roberts, Kevin Phillips, Stephenie Hendricks, Max Blumenthal, Frederick Carlson, Katherine Yurica, Michael Lerner and Salon's Michelle Goldberg, among others, as well as in my own books Cruel and Unusual and Fooled Again. The threat has also sounded strong alarms on solid Christian grounds, in writings by Jim Wallis, John Danforth, Jimmy Carter, Davidson Loehr, Rich Lang and Bruce Prescott. (Of course, the theocratic program is explicit also in the oratory and writings of the theocrats themselves.) It now remains for us to face the crucial fact that this regime's miraculous "re-election" in 2004 depended heavily on the countless block-the-vote activities of theocratic true believers, who did whatever they could do, from coast to coast, to cut the Kerry vote and pad the Bush vote. That effort was essential to the regime's inexplicable political success. Of all the interests collaborating in Bush/Cheney's drive against democracy, the theocrats alone have a grass-roots constituency -- not large enough, by any means, to sway elections honestly, but large enough, and fierce enough, and with sufficient funds and discipline, to help Bush/Cheney disenfranchise the majority. Although the corporations and the neo-cons wield awesome clout, they have no grass-roots muscle. The theocrats alone can claim that necessary asset, and it has given them enormous power.

It is a terrifying development -- although not insurmountable, unless we let ourselves be blinded and/or paralyzed by fear. Since the last Election Day, that terror has silenced nearly every sector of what ought to be the opposition, including most top Democrats, the press, a lot of principled conservatives -- and outlets like Salon. In his dogged effort to explain away the massive evidence of fraud by the Republicans, Manjoo has based his case not on the facts but, finally, on denial -- as he himself made very clear in his review of Fooled Again. "If you want to improve how Americans vote, here's one piece of advice," he wrote:

Don't alienate half the country by arguing, as Miller does here, that the president and his followers -- whom Miller labels "Busheviks" -- think of their political enemies as "subhuman beings" and believe they must "slaughter" their opponents in the same way that religious fanatics slaughter their holy foes. Even if you believe this to be true, and even if it is in fact true, shut up about it; this sort of unhinged rhetoric can't help, and can only hurt, our capacity to solve the problem of voting in America [emphasis added].

That an American reporter would make such a statement, and that any liberal magazine would publish it, suggests how thoroughly we have repressed all memory of what America was once supposed to mean. "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816, in a spirit of scientific progress and republican self-liberation. "Even if it's true, shut up about it," Farhad Manjoo wrote in 2005, in the spirit of Bill O'Reilly. Luckily, Manjoo was not a major player when the colonies were trying to get their act together, or we'd all be subjects of the House of Windsor. Although they once were a minority, the first republicans did not "shut up," but made their case until the people came around and finally took the crucial step toward liberty for all. In any case, Manjoo's command is as illogical as it is craven, for there is no convincing evidence that "half the country" voted for Bush/Cheney's re-election, nor is it clear how "shutting up" about the theocratic threat to our democracy could help "improve how Americans vote." The assumption there is that the theocratic movement might somehow be lulled into allowing us to have a functioning democracy, if we're very careful not to tell the truth about them, which will only make them mad. "Even if it's true, shut up about it." That is not the statement of "an open mind," but a plea for willful ignorance and wishful thinking.

If that were just Farhad Manjoo's position, Joan, I certainly would not have written you this letter. I write because that view of his, and yours, has paralyzed the whole political establishment, the press included; and Manjoo's latest piece, and your defense of it, provide a fitting opportunity to point that out. If, as you say, you want to see the system fixed, you must admit that it needs fixing now -- a great step forward that has just been taken by Bob Herbert of The New York Times as well as Robert Kennedy and other reputable people. It is past time to take that step, for there is every indication -- as Salon should now be pointing out -- that the Republicans are readier than ever to subvert the process once more on this next Election Day.

While they gear up to strike again, the Democrats and media keep trying to "solve" the problem of election fraud by claiming endlessly, and groundlessly, that there's no problem, or by charging that the problem somehow lies with all those trouble-makers who insist on trying to talk about it, or that the problem is not partisan malfeasance but "incompetence." Salon must finally break away from that impossible consensus, which means no longer seconding the Democrats as they keep struggling to avoid the issue, but calling on them to behave, at last, like democrats -- and, for that matter, like republicans -- which is to say, at last, like good Americans.