Comments on the present status of elastic and inelastic magnetic electron--deuteron scattering

The long-standing discrepancies between theory and experiment in the magnetic elastic and inelastic scattering of electrons from the deuteron at high momentum transfer are reexamined. It is concluded that the predictions using most deuteron models agree with the elastic scattering data if one employs the presently accepted dipole fit (with scaling) for the proton and neutron form factors. A second conclusion is that the inelastic scattering to the $^{1}S_{0}$ state is not affected by small changes in the nucleon form factors, but is completely dominated by dynamic effects such as those due to meson-exchange diagrams.