Robert Kennedy Jr. has concluded that the Republicans stole the 2004 Presidential election, and that they did this in Ohio, encountering little Democratic resistance even to the present.  Dan Tokaji has answered, on the authority of unimpeachable credentials and with careful reasoning: he rejects this conclusion, but he still gives Kennedy points for keeping alive the pressing questions of election reform. 
Farhad Manjoo, writing in Salon, does not make any allowances for Kennedy, subjecting his claims to merciless refutation.  Republicans will, for partisan reasons of their own, dismiss Kennedy’s claims out of hand, with a sneer and with speculation about motives, as James Taranto has already done on Opinionjournal.com. 

     It is possible to rehabilitate Kennedy’s case to some measure of respectability by emphasizing his passion more than his accuracy and by reading the piece as a personal memoir of pain and frustration over the 2004 election results and his very individual attempt to make sense of what happened.  Yet this is not Kennedy’s project, and so while it might be gracious to judge his work by a standard not really relevant to it, the fact remains:  his case does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.  Democrats prepared with complete justification to batter the Republicans this fall with allegations of incompetence should find it especially incongruous to credit this same party with the conspiratorial genius and pinpoint execution alleged by Kennedy. 

     But let us say that Kennedy’s work is a good political piece:  guaranteed to cause readers of Rolling Stone, convinced of this conspiracy in the first place, to swoon in delight.  And he has published it at a time when it might rouse the faithful to even greater vigilance than in 2004.  "Fooled once, shame on you; fooled twice, shame on me."; and all of that.  And to the extent that he reminds people of some of the more ignominious actions of 2004—Ken Blackwell’s, for example—this is a service of sorts, never repeated too often, until such time as we sensibly refuse to allow hard partisans to control the voting process.

     Yet what Kennedy does not see is that he is playing quite unwittingly into the hands of his adversaries.  He is arguing that the electoral process as it functions, or does not, today is not merely in poor shape, but that it is ripe for the fraudulent picking.  Robert Kennedy, Jr, meet John Fund:  the two of you have more in common than you know.  True, Kennedy would argue that some of the criminal and unethical behavior here is uniquely Republican or right wing in nature—such as in the targeting of minority and African-American neighborhoods, which is fairly condemned as a standing disgrace.  But he is also portraying a system so vulnerable to fraud that Republicans can have their way with it, engineering the purposeful disenfranchisement of enough voters to change the outcome of a Presidential election. 

     If this is so, then anyone can aspire to carry out the same kind of plot.  Hence:  election fraud, not enfranchisement, becomes the central issue of the day—just as Republicans would like to argue, and just as they do, all the time and as a matter of institutional policy.  Once the Republicans have finished rebutting or ridiculing the specific arguments made by Kennedy, they will see that he is really, on a point of central concern to them, on their side.  If our electoral system is rife with massive, effective fraud or its potential, this—and not structural discrimination, inadequate funding or poor administration—is what we ought to focus on.  And indeed when Robert Kennedy appeared on CNN to tout his theories, he found that Terry Holt of Bush-Cheney ’04 was present to agree with him about the prevalence of fraud in 2004, but not about the responsible party. 

     Nothing could serve progressives less well than this debate.  This outcry against ostensible fraud has already had some grim success as states have proceeded to enact photo identification requirements on little more than the sort of reasoning used by Kennedy.  Kennedy, of course, would object strongly to these requirements, and he does, in the course of his article; but why?  If fraud decided the last election, we would be well justified in putting off more comprehensive measures to promote voting and focus instead on pseudo-protections to defend against another scam of this scope in two years. 

     How does the voter benefit from one more lap around this swamp of fetid suspicion?  The answer is that she does not.  But for partisans, there is plenty of good politics here.  Democrats can fancy that they really won in 2004, and they can engage in what they do all too often, self-absorbed self-criticism, as they decide that they are really the ones at fault for all that has gone wrong in the last three years, because, for lack of virile resolve, they could have insisted on the defeat of George W. Bush and the victory of John Kerry.  Republicans can scorn this attack while secretly reveling in it, since it credits them with the sort of mastery of means in the pursuit of illicit ends that appears to have eluded them in every other endeavor.  And still more important, it brings the Democrats around, however bitterly, to the Republican’s spurious claim:  that election fraud is the most important problem affecting the right to vote in the United States. 

     So Kennedy’s piece is not merely a weak technical argument. It is not a useful or productive political tract either, save in purely partisan terms, yielding a rush of purely partisan satisfactions.  This should not be confused with, and indeed it works against, a strategy for progressive electoral reform. 

Bob Bauer