Manjoo Dismisses Fraud Allegations in NH Vote. So What?
Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo says he's highly skeptical that Tuesday's New Hampshire Presidential primary was rigged. That conclusion is not a surprise to folks who follow U.S. elections, history and technology. As uncharacteristic as it is for a Salon staffer to side with the Establishment and question the positions taken by activists, Manjoo has almost 100% consistently done so on this topic. With one exception (a big one: the Bush machine's outright thievery of the 2004 election over the real winner, Al Gore), he has dismissed every concern raised about vote fraud through technology.
Manjoo does suggest that the electorate is or should be entitled to more certainty about election results, more transparency. He agrees with vote fraud blogger Brad Friedman who asks simply, "Why can't they just count the damn votes?" But he offers a weak -- though not unreasonable -- argument against the New Hampshire vote rigging charges. In essence, he says that demographic differences between hand-counted paper ballot precincts and optical-scan machine-counted precincts could (and, he seems to say, does) account for the wide discrepancies reported in results between the two.
That's a plausible explanation but it does not, by its existence or pronouncement, out of hand dismiss the possibility that machine fraud is at the root here.
More troubling for me as I read and assess Manjoo's case, is his flip dismissal of the value of exit polling as an indicator of voter fraud. "Regular readers might know that I've long been skeptical of efforts to use exit polls -- surveys of voters as they leave voting booths -- as a forensic tool to detect fraud," he says. Never mind the fact that -- at the insistence of our country -- international bodies attempting to ensure the honesty and integrity of elections in "less advanced" nations than ours have been using this same technique for quite a number of years. Apparently, what is good enough for Iraq voters is not a useful tool for juding the fairness of American voting.
I can't prove the NH elections were rigged. But neither can anyone else prove that they were fair and honest. And that, at the end of the day, is the troubling truth. Manjoo agrees with that assessment. And he applauds Dennis Kucinich's call for a recount.
As a member of the non-mainstream media, I believe Manjoo would better serve is readers if he would adopt a big more skepticism about official government lines and stories on issues that are so central and vital to our democracy.
