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Remember Election Day 2004? It's back. Remember when early exit polls made it look like John Kerry was the winner of the presidential election, and that soon changed and George W. Bush was eventually determined to have been reelected? Those exit polls combined with some irregularities, particularly in the key state of Ohio, are the stuff from which conspiracy theories are made, or was there in fact, a conspiracy from which a presidency was made?

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Robert Kennedy, Jr. asks, "Was the 2004 election stolen?" and goes through all the problems and knew, and there were many, with the presidential election in Ohio, and tries to convince us that the answer to the question, was the 2004 election stolen, is yes.

Now one person who remains unconvinced is salon.com writer, Farhad Manjoo, who has written a rebuttal to Kennedy's article. Both men join us now. There are links to both of their articles on our show page. If you'd like to check them out, go to wnyc.org and click on Brian Lehrer Show. Welcome back, Farhad. Welcome back, Robert to WNYC. Hello, there.

Farhad Manjoo: Thank you.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: What you agree on is that neither of you think the way the election in Ohio was conducted was our democracies finest hour. Robert Kennedy, you want to start in and make your case? What are the biggest pieces of evidence that you would start out with?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: The biggest issue here is that there was a deliberate concerted effort by the Republican Party, and this is indisputable, to steal the 2004 election. Whether or not they actually succeeded, you'll never be able to prove one way or the other because the Republicans illegally derailed a legally mandated recount at the ballots. The indications are from looking at the numbers, that they in fact did succeed.

It was over 350,000 Ohio citizens who never got a chance to vote, most of them Democratic, or whose votes weren't counted. In addition to that, in 12 western counties in Ohio, there were 80,000 votes cast for John Kerry that ended up being switched to George Bush. Bush only won the state by 118,000, votes according to the official tally. That number alone would have been sufficient to give him the election.

In addition to that, there were at least six other counties where tens of thousands of Ohio voters of Democratic voters had their vote switch from Kerry to Bush. Brian, the real issue here is that you'll never be able to dispute the numbers to be undefined. Mr. Manjoo who's on this show too has made a cottage industry of restarting the Republican talking points about this issue and disputing numbers. I [unintelligible 00:03:53] of each of these numbers.

The numbers are correct. I urge your listeners who do read the Salon piece by Mr. Manjoo to also go to my reply to the Salon piece in which I reply to him point by point on each of these issues. The [unintelligible 00:04:13] dispute is really almost a slide issue. The real issue is that there were hundreds of different efforts by the Republicans to suppress the Democratic vote, illegal efforts on ethical and illegal, and that they probably succeeded, or that they may or may not have succeeded in shifting the vote to President Bush. They certainly tried and the press has not covered this issue given this attempted theft of American democracy the coverage that it really deserves.

Brian Lehrer: Farhad, before I let you respond, Robert, take us into-- I don't want to get bogged down in any of these numbers. I also want to spend some of this time talking not about the past, but about the future, because there's a lot of concern, certainly among Democrats, that Kenneth Blackwell, who was the Ohio Secretary of State and who got to set some of these rules in 2004, is doing the same thing again for the 2006 election where he also happens to be a candidate for governor.

Not to mention the effect that some of the rules that he's working with this year may have on congressional races in a year when control of Congresses is in play. Let's get a little bit into the numbers. There's this 300,000 names were purged issue. Purged from voter rolls resulting, you say, in 30,000 people who couldn't vote. What is the purge in that case?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: In major Democratic strongholds like Toledo, and Cleveland, and Columbus, the people who controlled the boards of elections were Republican sympathizers, who simply dropped 300,000 voters from the voting roll.

Now, there's a law in Ohio that says that if somebody hasn't voted for two elections, you can drop them from the roll. The law also requires that those people be notified first, and they were never notified. Their names were simply dropped from the rolls, and that means that those people showed up, vote on Election Day, and couldn't cast their ballots.

Brian Lehrer: These were people whose registrations were not--

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: People from overwhelmingly Democratic district.

Brian Lehrer: Right, but people whose registration status was not being disputed or anything like that, but just rather dropped?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: They hadn't voted in the previous two elections.

Brian Lehrer: Was that the law in Ohio?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Anyway, they allegedly hadn't. There are hundreds of affidavits from individuals who in fact had voted, and whose names were purged as a result of that kind of pretext.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Farhad--

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: The pretext was a legal one, which is that you can purge people who haven't voted in two elections. The problem is you're required to notify them first. None of these people were notified.

Brian Lehrer: Farhad, let's start there. What about that point? That's a lot of people. If they were in Democratic strongholds, we're already starting to approach the margin of victory for the President in that state.

Farhad Manjoo: I think it's telling that Mr. Kennedy only counts 30,000 of those 300,000 people as being actual Kerry voters. I think that indicates a key problem with this statistic is that we just don't know how many of those people were actually real voters, or would have voted for Kerry. The problem is that election rolls are routinely cleaned up in places. You can disagree with the way it was done. I certainly think that there's some indication that it wasn't done in a fair way in some places. I don't think that you can actually count those people as being Kerry voters. We know nothing about them. Some of them might not have been actual people. Many of them might not have been actual people.

Brian Lehrer: If he's located them in urban Democratic strongholds, don't you have to assume based on history, an overwhelming Democratic margin among those people had they voted?

Farhad Manjoo: He hasn't located them as being actual people. He's located them as being names of people who haven't voted in two previous elections. Under that criteria, they are to be dropped from the rolls.

I think there's also some dispute about whether they were notified or not. There are affidavits that say some people weren't notified, but then in actual articles that Mr. Kennedy cites in his article in the source material, elections officials say that people were notified. They were sent letters to those addresses. When it turned out that those people didn't reply and respond, then they were dropped from the rolls.

I think there was dispute about whether those people were actual voters. You asked whether the registration status was in some doubt, and it was. That was the reason that they were dropping them from the roll.

Brian Lehrer: Because they hadn't voted. Robert Kennedy, why assume if they hadn't voted in two years that they were going to vote this time and count them in the Kerry column, hypothetically?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: First of all, these were real people as much as any vote is a real person. They are people who registered to vote. They were in Democratic districts. Their names were purged illegally. They were not sent letters beforehand. Mr. Manjoo is conflating two different episodes. One episode with a group called The Mighty Texas Strike Force, which was a group of Republican thugs who are hired to derail voters in Democratic districts from voting. Republican Party officials sent out illegally, sent out 250,000 letters in a technique called caging. It is against the law, the Republican Party has been enjoined from doing it. The activities of the Republican Party in Ohio have subsequently been found to be illegal, that caging technique. The problem was that the court decision didn't come down till after the election.

Farhad Manjoo: Brian, I just want to say that I'm not actually conflating to--

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Let me just add one other thing. The 30,000 number that we use, we say 300,000 people, over 300,000 people were purged from the rolls. There's no dispute about that. I use the number 30,000 because it is a very conservative number. That's assuming only 1 out of every 10 of those people were a real registered voter. In reality, you could have had 90% or 99% that were real registered voters. In all of the data that I used in this article, I used the most conservative statistics because I wanted to make sure to be accurate.

Brian Lehrer: Robert Kennedy, hang on, I don't want to go round and round on this one point because there are a few others that I want to get to. Then Farhad, I will want to ask you to respond to the big picture argument that Robert Kennedy is making that there was a systematic effort to suppress democratic votes in Ohio. That was to some degree successful and that was way beyond what the Democrats were either trying to do or succeeded in doing in Ohio which, of course, was the swing state at the end of the day that swung the election to President Bush.

One more specific first, the long lines. Everybody heard about the long lines in Ohio, in some places hours and hours and hours. Robert Kennedy, give me about a minute on how much you think that actually affected the outcome in terms of votes.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Well, it had enormous impact. Particularly in working-class and poor neighborhoods, some of these lines were 11 hours long in poor neighborhoods. The Black districts, African American districts and liberal districts like Kenyon College were systematically shorted in the allocation of voting machines by Republican officials.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Kenyon College was much--

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Meanwhile, Republican officials flooded the Republican districts and precincts with voting machines so that the average wait for Republican suburban voter in Ohio during the 2004 election was around 18 minutes. The average wait for a Democratic urban Black voter was over three hours.

Now, most people or many people, we have to assume, looked at those lines and said, "We can't wait there. Our boss won't let us off." There's a lot of reasons you wouldn't wait in a 3-hour or 5-hour and 11-hour line.

Brian Lehrer: You say the average wait for urban Black voters?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: The average wait was three hours. Some of the waits were in excess of 11 hours.

Brian Lehrer: Farhad Manjoo?

Farhad Manjoo: Well, it's true that many people waited in long lines. The key question here is how many votes that affected. There's not any evidence to show that that would've affected enough people to swung the race over to John Kerry. Mr. Kennedy says that he looks at the most conservative numbers, but about 48,000 of those people that he counts as missing voters because of long lines didn't even go to the polls that day. They didn't go because they had heard that there may have been long lines or that there may have been other registration problems.

Mr. Kennedy gets this number from a Democratic, from a poll, a telephone poll that the Democratic Party did in January of 2005, several months after the election. The Democratic Party called people up and it found out that less than 1% of the people in that poll didn't go to the precinct at all that day. That accounted for about 48,000 people and the Democratic Party itself was extremely careful with how it looked at that number.

Brian Lehrer: I have to jump in because we have to take a break. We'll continue with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Farhad Manjoo, and we'll talk about the big picture of what was done and what was attempted to get done in Ohio in 2004 and what's happening in 2006. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and author of the article in Rolling Stone, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? He concludes, yes, obviously by taking a look at many details in several reports. Farhad Manjoo, writer for salon.com has written also in detail about why he thinks Robert Kennedy Jr. is wrong. We can take some of your phone calls and emails. It's Brian Lehrer Show at wnyc.org. If you're contacting us online, Brian Lehrer Show at wnyc.org, or call 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

Farhad, do you dispute the big picture that there was a concerted effort by Republicans including the Secretary of State of Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, to suppress votes? We heard about the thing where they wanted all registrations to be on 80 stock paper or better, which was seen as a way of suppressing inner-city votes. That was undone, but they probably got away with some of that to some degree first, that there were all these various things that were done that things were set up so that lines would be longer in Democratic districts than Republican districts, and that all of this was done with some effect?

Farhad Manjoo: I think that in some cases you can say that some of the incidents that we saw were part of a concerted effort. I think you mentioned one, the cardstock paper incident, the caging that Mr. Kennedy mentioned earlier was clearly an effort to reduce the number of people at the polls. As to the incidents that led to the largest numbers of people not voting which is by far and away the long lines, I don't think that there's enough evidence there to say that was caused by--

Brian Lehrer: Let's get off the numbers for a minute. Again, I think Mr. Kennedy is making the point that even if the numbers don't quite add up and we can't reverse the 2004 election anyway, we have a serious problem that the nation has yet to come to grips with, which is that in Ohio and probably other states, there are active voter suppression efforts taking place right now. That's really the headline here. Do you agree with that, and that the Republicans have the power and have the effectiveness at doing this right now, much more than Democrats?

Farhad Manjoo: Well, I think that it's the case that partisan election officials won elections in this country. In Ohio where you had a Republican Secretary of State, in Florida where you had Republican Secretaries of State, you had people who were running the election who were also trying to get George W. Bush to win. They certainly did a lot of things that had the effect of reducing the number of Democrats at the polls. I definitely think that's the case.

Brian Lehrer: Robert F. Kennedy, do you want to respond in, do you want to talk about 2006 and what's going on right now?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Well, the same techniques that have been used in Ohio are now being institutionalized all across the country. In fact, there's a whole raft of new rules in Ohio that have been pushed by Secretary Blackwell and the Republican legislatures which will effectively disenfranchise large numbers of voters.

The New York Times had a elite editorial last week discussing or condemning Blackwell's efforts to stop voter registration in the state. The League of Women voters and other voter registration groups have said that new rules that were minted by Blackwell that make registration almost impossible, mass registration drives almost impossible, have stopped them from registering new voters.

Brian Lehrer: Let me read a little bit from that Times editorial from the other day, last Wednesday. Farhad Manjoo, see if you agree that this is a serious challenge to democracy in the State of Ohio.

It says, "This year, Mr. Blackwell's office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers and perhaps even volunteers personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally," they say, "have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors who can then review them for errors.

Under Mr. Blackwell's edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell's rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law." A, is that voter suppression? B, do you think it's legal?

Farhad Manjoo: Well, it certainly sounds like it's not legal. If your definition of voter suppression is you are actively trying to reduce the number of people who vote, then I think that that counts for that as well.

I think the problem here is that we need in Ohio and at the federal level, desperate election reform, and we've needed it. We needed it after 2000 clearly. The reform that we got then didn't help matters at all, and in some instances, hurt elections. We needed it after 2004, and we need it now.

I think the problem and the reason that I've been critical of Mr. Kennedy's article is not because I think he's wrong on the big picture that we need election reform, but I think that when he makes the case, and I think it's a weak case, that John Kerry actually won the 2004 race, that he actually hurts the case for election reform. I think election reform is an amazingly difficult thing to push through Congress and state legislatures because politicians are usually very reluctant to mess with the machinery that brought them there. You have to approach it carefully. You can't go around allying the movement with this partisan notion that two years ago, the election was stolen when there's not enough evidence for it. You're going to just going to turn people off from actually doing the necessary reforms to fix the problem.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take some phone calls. Jessica in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Farhad Manjoo. Hello, Jessica.

Jessica: Hi, how are you? I actually moved to Ohio from New York in 2004, registered to vote. I made sure I got all the correct information of where to go. I went to the Public Library in Cincinnati where I was living. Mysteriously, I never got any of my-- I assumed I was automatically registered to vote at that point.

Well, apparently, my registration along with many, many others, I was not registered to vote. I found this out just by not getting the mail and calling up and saying, "No, I'm sorry, we don't have any record of you." This did happen on a huge scale. I knew personally many people that this happened to. I don't know what the answers are as far as reform. Maybe somebody could speak to that. As much as, I forget the author's name, who is rebutting with Mr. Kennedy--

Brian Lehrer: Farhad Manjoo from Salon.com.

Jessica: What absolutely sound to be very accurate from everything that I personally witnessed and many of the politically active Democrats that I saw on the ground in Ohio, we saw all of this going on. It was a huge fight, and they won. I think you're discounting the fact that these events really did take place. I'm sorry, but they did. It's not an exaggeration.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, did you finally get to vote?

Jessica: No, I did not actually, and so I moved back to New York because I'm not going to live in a state where I'm not allowed to vote. I was coming from New York. Maybe that was a reason why they threw my registration out. I'll never know, but it happened to many, many people that I knew.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for your call. Robert Kennedy, it's typical for Democrats to argue for greater access to the polls, because that's in their interest, and Republicans to worry more about preventing fraud as they would claim it and control access because that's in their interests. Is this just partisan on your part, ultimately?

Robert Kennedy, Jr: No. I've been disciplined over 23 years of advocacy about being unpartisan and bipartisan in my approach to the issue. I don't think there's Republican children or Democratic children. It's really the integrity of our democracy is at stake here. You look at these people, you look at the Conyers Report on the 1000s of people who signed affidavits who lined up to give testimony about their franchise being stolen. This is a real issue.

I was on Tucker Carlson the other day and he said, "Well, if this conspiracy, and that's what Republican talking points always say, dismiss this as a conspiracy, these people who questioned the validity of the election as kind of tinfoil hat plates. If there was a conspiracy, how could they have kept it secret?" My reply to that is, there was no effort to keep it secret. This was open and notorious. There were 22 lawsuits against Kenneth Blackwell, most of them by voters, most of them ultimately won. The problem, it was too late to salvage the election.

In Warren County, Ohio, this kind of activity was typical in these 12 western counties where 80,000 votes were stolen from Kerry and shifted to Bush. Warren County, Ohio was one of those counties. After the polls closed, Warren County declared a terrorist alert. The Republican Board of Elections declared a terrorist alert, got rid of the independent observers, ejected the press, and then took the ballots and brought them to a warehouse controlled by a Republican, and then counted them and recounted them three times, increasing each time the margin for Bush, until Bush got 7,000 more votes in 2004 than he got against Warren in 2000.

The FBI, the next day, denied that it had ever given a terrorist warning to the Warren County Republicans. Nine days later, the Columbus newspapers disclosed that emails between the Warren County Republican Board of Election officials showed that they had been planning this terrorist alert days in advance.

In addition to that, you had a recount in the state that was completely derailed by illegal activities by Republican officials working with the voting machine company, TRIAD, which went into the electric offices and fix the machines, cheated on them, and gave election officials cheat sheets. This is all public record.

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Brian Lehrer: Farhad, I know that we reported on the theorist alert issue in that particular area at the time.

Robert Kennedy, Jr: You're one of the few media organs that did that. Keith Olbermann who's the anchor for MSNBC--

Brian Lehrer: He did it.

Robert Kennedy, Jr: --told me, and he did it too, and he got tens of 1000s of hate mails from the Republican bloggers.

Brian Lehrer: Luckily here in New York, we usually get thank yous. We did a whole series looking at the Ohio vote after that election. Farhad Manjoo, how do you see those two examples that Robert was just giving?

Farhad Manjoo: Certainly, in some of those counties, you saw problems that are hard to explain. In the Warren County example that he mentioned, that incident has been talked about over and over. I think that that's something that someone should have looked into.

Here's the problem; I think that it's telling that the Republican talking point is that these people are conspiracy theorists, that it's a tinfoil hat thing. I think that that's exactly my point, that when you go and say that John Kerry actually won the race before you say that we need election reform-- When political scientists have looked at this question that Mr. Kennedy raises about 80,000 votes being shifted from Kerry to Bush in rural counties, political scientists who worked with the Democratic Party and independent political scientists have looked at this question and found no evidence of that. The evidence for it, his argument for it, is extremely weak.

If you go and say based on those kinds of things, that John Kerry actually won the race, I think that the natural Republican reaction to that is going to be, "Well, you're just conspiracy theorists. You're relying on faulty evidence to make this case." I think that if people hadn't been saying the day after John Kerry conceded, that actually he won the race, and hadn't been saying it for months afterwards, and instead had been saying that what happened in Ohio was a travesty and that it needed to be investigated, regardless of who won, I think that that would have increased the probability that there would have been an actual investigation.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, let me jump in--

Robert Kennedy, Jr: Of course, people were saying that, both of those things. I urge anybody who just listened to that to go to the Salon website and look at the replies from a whole raft of political scientists disputing Mr. Manjoo's arguments that those 80,000 votes weren't stolen.

Brian Lehrer: Let me read, Robert Kennedy, for you an email that came in that says, "Simple question, with all these doubts about the election, why then did Kerry concede and concede so quickly?" I will add, why does he continue including in a statement to you for your article as it appears, seem to say that he feels there is no proof that the election was stolen from him?

Robert Kennedy, Jr: What Kerry says is that, at the time that he made the decision in the narrow window, 24 hours after the election, that his attorneys told him that he did not have sufficient proof to go to court and win a case that the election was stolen. What he says in the Rolling Stone article is that he can still not prove that to assertive, but he believes that the evidence is very strong that, in fact, it was stolen.

Brian Lehrer: Charlie in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC.

Charlie: Yes thanks, Brian. A pretty illustrative example just recently is that the head of the Republican Party in New Hampshire was found guilty of jamming the phone lines on election day. He was sent to prison for this and as soon as he got out the Republican Party hired him back again to work on this year's election. I don't think there's really any doubt that there's some sort of real monstrous conspiracy going on to limit people's ability to vote.

Something that happened, there was a commission headed by former President Carter and James Baker, of all people, that came out with a list of things to do that would help improve elections. This was on C-SPAN about six months ago. It got no publicity. The main point they made was that if you have secretaries of state like Catherine Harris and Kenneth Blackwell running the elections, you will not get fair elections as long as these partisan people have the power to set the rules.

Brian Lehrer: Is there any other way, though? Farhad Manjoo, do you think very briefly that this could be taken out of the hands of the elected officials who obviously come from political parties?

Farhad Manjoo: Oh, yes. In some states, you have non-partisan elections officials people who run the elections who aren't of either party, and you have elections boards that are non-partisan. I think that should be at least a federal law that that'd be the case. I don't think it can be a federal law but there should be some federal effort to make sure the elections run in states are non-partisan.

Brian Lehrer: Right. By the way Robert Kennedy, just curious, I know that Seymour Hersh once wrote that J Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the 1960 election from your uncle. In deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI findings, particularly on voter fraud in Illinois which was very close and went to John Kennedy that they referred the FBI findings to your father and he effectively buried the case, according to Seymour Hersh. Have you ever looked back into that and do you have an opinion?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Well that simply isn't true. The historical record on that is very clear, and it's been a rumor for many years that because Mayor Daley had dead people voting in Cook County, that's what gave John Kennedy the margin in Illinois and therefore the presidency. That isn't true. First, I'd like to say anybody who steals votes is wrong. It's wrong and it is an assault. It's a treason toward democracy. They should be prosecuted and they should not be tolerated by the press.

In this particular case, first of all, even if John Kennedy had lost Illinois, he would've still won the presidency because Illinois only had 12 electoral votes and he was ahead by 85 electoral votes. Second of all, what the subsequent investigation found is that there was more Republican votes but the Republicans downstate stole more votes than Daley did in Cook County.

Brian Lehrer: All right.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: The election board of the state which was four-to-one Republican, certified the election unanimously.

Brian Lehrer: Robert Kennedy Jr. and Farhad Manjoo, thank you both for having this debate on the air as you have had it online. People can read that at salon.com and a lot more to come this year on Clean Elections before November 2006. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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