Articles by Paul Krugman
From:
Janie Sheppard
To:
krugman@nytimes.com
Sent: Friday, August 19, 2005 5:03 PM
Subject: Thank you very much for this morning's op-ed in the NYT
Dear Mr. Krugman:
Your op-ed piece, the first to point out that unless the Republicans are called to account for their actions in the last two presidential elections, they
will surely engage in voter suppression and fraudulent counting again in 2006.
I wish you would follow up with another article on various efforts to expose counting fraud and prevent such fraud from taking place again.
Election reform legislation can't, by itself, stop fraud. Jailing the responsible elections officials will. First, though, there must be criminal investigations.
State election laws seemed designed to prevent identifying fraud. In California, for example, only a recount which must be demanded by a losing candidate,
can operate to allow the ballot boxes to be opened. All the energy that is going into assuring a paper trail will be of little significance if that paper
trail cannot be audited by citizen efforts and/or criminal fraud investigators.
I would be willing to bet a very fine bottle of California wine (I lived in wine country) that Bush's actual popular vote was several hundred thousand fewer
than the "official" state certifications indicate. Add to that the voter suppression and it's not a stretch to conclude that Bush in fact lost the 2004
election.
I find it mystifying that the Democrats are not dealing with the election fraud. If they don't, all the great candidates, platforms, campaigns, money,
and celebrity support won't matter--as you point out in your article. This could be yet another op-ed piece: ask Dean, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton what
they are going to do to assure election integrity.
In November, December and January I spent several hours on websites where various people reported election fraud and then wrote a little article which our
local paper published as an op-ed piece. I suspect there were other such "little articles" as well. I wrote the article after spending several frustrating
days emailing major media asking them to conduct a survey like the one conducted by the NYT and other papers after 2004. I got only one answer to all
my emails--a Vanity Fair editor who said he was so dejected by the election that he just couldn't do it. He reported that he had dozens of such email
supplications. Even after writing the article I couldn't let it go. I follow the reports--such as they are--and pass them along to like minded friends,
a small gesture.
There are people who have devoted all their waking hours to surfacing the fraud. They are frazzled and out of money, but because they see what their efforts
are uncovering, they continue. Truly, they are heroes.
Thank you again. I hope your piece heralds a new era .
Sincerely yours,
Janie Sheppard
Ukiah, California
August 19, 2005 NYT
What They Did Last Fall
By
PAUL KRUGMAN
By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because
those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And
the next election may be worse.
In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent,
provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."
Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was
true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised
large numbers of valid voters.
But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy.
If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly
divided than ever.
Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly.
For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.
And what about 2004?
Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you
it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan
history of dirty elections.
He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential
election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."
So what does U.S. democracy look like? There have been two Democratic reports on Ohio in 2004, one commissioned by Representative John Conyers Jr., the
other by the Democratic National Committee.
The D.N.C. report is very cautious: "The purpose of this investigation," it declares, "was not to challenge or question the results of the election in any
way." It says there is no evidence that votes were transferred away from John Kerry - but it does suggest that many potential Kerry votes were suppressed.
Although the Conyers report is less cautious, it stops far short of claiming that the wrong candidate got Ohio's electoral votes.
But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these
lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to
cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.
The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state,
Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem
mild by comparison.
And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting,
citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable
98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.
We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?
Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids
would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be
strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.
August 22, 2005 New
York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The 2000 election is still an open sore on the body politic. That was clear from the outraged reaction to my mention last week of what would have happened with a full statewide manual recount of Florida.
This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner.
The second is what would have happened if there had been a full, statewide manual recount - as there should have been. The probable answer is that Al Gore would have won, by a tiny margin.
The third is what would have happened if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated by butterfly ballots, felon purges and more; the answer is that Mr. Gore would have won by a much larger margin.
About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount.
The Herald group later did an analysis of "overvotes," in which more than one choice was recorded, but this wasn't a true recount, because some of it was based on computer records rather than the ballots themselves.
In November 2001 a larger consortium, which included The New York Times, produced more definitive results that allowed assessment of nine hypothetical recounts. (You can see the results at www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl - under articles.) The three recounts that had been most widely discussed during the battle of Florida, including the partial recount requested by the Gore campaign and two interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court order, would have given the vote to Mr. Bush.
But the six hypothetical manual recounts that would have covered the whole state - including both loose and strict standards - would have given the election to Mr. Gore. And other evidence makes it clear that many intended votes for Mr. Gore were frustrated.
So why do so many people believe the Bush win was rock solid?
One answer is that many editorials and op-ed articles have claimed that no possible recount would have changed the outcome. Let's be charitable and assume that those who write such things are victims of the echo chamber, and believe that what everyone they talk to says must be true.
The other answer is that many though not all reports of the results of the ballot reviews conveyed a false impression about what those reviews said. A few reports got the facts wrong, but for the most part they simply stressed the likelihood - in some cases presented as a certainty - that Mr. Bush would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened. But even if a proper recount wasn't in the cards given the political realities, that says nothing about what such a recount would have found.
The tone of these reports may have been influenced by the timing: the second consortium's report came out just two months after 9/11. The country wanted very badly to believe in its leadership. Nobody wanted to write stories suggesting that the wrong man was sitting in the White House.
More broadly, the story of the 2000 election remains deeply disturbing - not just the fact that a man the voters tried to reject ended up as president, but the ugliness of the fight itself. There was an understandable urge to put the story behind us.
But we aren't doing the country a favor when we present recent history in a way that makes our system look better than it is. Sometimes the public needs to hear unpleasant truths, even if those truths make them feel worse about their country.
Not to be coy: election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com