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In this issue’s cover piece, Eric Umansky points out that journalists not only seek to publicize truths but also help determine which truths count. A story’s tone, its placement, and whether it gets followed up all have something to do with whether it is perceived by the public as a big deal. Sometimes the press seems leery of making that determination. The possibility of manipulation of the vote in national elections is that kind of story. It’s as if we don’t want to go there. Consider the battleground state of Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. As in Florida in 2000 " when Katherine Harris was both secretary of state and co-chair of the Bush-Cheney state campaign committee " Ohio’s secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, was also co-chair of Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio. And as in Florida, there was controversy. But it didn’t get too much mileage. For one thing, unlike Florida’s razor-thin 537-vote margin in 2000, Bush officially carried Ohio by some 136,000 votes. Tales of vote manipulation were generally covered either as small potatoes or as squawks from the loony left (which some were). The story never quite went away " The Washington Post and The Columbus Dispatch dipped in, among other papers, as did Vanity Fair, Harper’s, The American Prospect, and a couple of books. When the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr., issued a measured but blistering report that found “numerous serious election irregularities . . . which affected hundreds of thousands of votes,” Ohio got another few minutes in the spotlight. Ohio popped up again in a June 15 piece in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The headline asked, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” Kennedy thought so. But most of the media yawned. The New York Times, typically strong on voting controversy, dealt with the Rolling Stone story in its abysmal Sunday Styles section with a profile of Kennedy that managed to mention the drug problem he had some twenty years ago, but not to fairly present his argument. One outlet that did not ignore the piece was Salon, where the staff writer Farhad Manjoo asserts that he takes Kennedy’s argument apart, but, upon close inspection, much of the Rolling Stone analysis survives. And Manjoo does not address a lot of what went wrong in Ohio. There were barriers to registration, such as Blackwell’s insistence that registration forms had to be a particular weight of paper, thus blocking many prospective voters. There were purges of voting rolls, such as an arbitrary implementation " just before the election " of an Ohio law that invalidated voters’ registrations if they had failed to vote in the previous two elections, as well as the use of an illegal mailing tactic called “caging” to strike voters from the rolls if they failed to respond in time to a letter to their address of record. There was extremely poor distribution of voting machines in heavily Democratic urban areas. In his recent book, Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression, Spencer Overton points out that in our country the will of the people is channeled through a matrix of rules and regulations that can “filter out certain citizens from voting.” And that in our closely divided political environment, that can make all the difference. We’re not making the case that the election of 2004 was stolen, and we’d rather look ahead than back. But we are arguing that intolerable things happened in Ohio that merited more sustained attention from the national press. And that targeting particular groups for vote suppression is reprehensible, yet effective, and will continue unless challenged. (In late August, Salon named six states that appear ripe for trouble.) Guarding the democratic process is part of the journalistic mission, and with another election approaching, now is the time to think about that. Suppressing democracy is, yes, a big deal