STILL COUNTING THE VOTES

It's almost Thanksgiving and they are still counting the votes from the election held on the first Tuesday of this month. That is not unusual, of course. Absentee ballots, paper ballots from rural districts and the new provisional ballots all take time to count. You may remember the headline from the British tabloid that said something about 59 million Americans being dumb for voting for George W. Bush. Well, the actual figure is more than 61 million, 61,121,520 at this point and still counting. Follow the link to Dave Leip's site about US Presidential elections, the best I've seen on the subject. You'll also note that as they keep counting the margin between Bush and Kerry remains remarkably stable. It was about a 3.5 million vote lead for Bush the day after the election, and it is about that now. The President's lead in Ohio has dropped from about 180,000 the day after the election to about 130,000 now. Still, one can see why the Kerry people knew better than to draw things out into a recount. They knew the margin was too much to overcome, even if they got the lion's share of absentee and provisional ballots. They also knew that if they were to demand a recount with that kind of margin in Ohio, the Bush people would do the same in Pennsylvania (where Kerry won with a current margin of 130,000) or Wisconsin (Kerry by only 13,000). There simply isn't a Florida 2000 scenario to be found in the 2004 election (Bush leads by 380,000 in Florida at this time, by the way). The two closest states are New Mexico and New Hampshire. Kerry won New Hampshire by about 8,000 votes and Bush won New Mexico by about 8,000 votes. At some point, though, each state will make it's results official and we will finally know the exact number of "dumb" Americans who made the right choice (stick it in your eye, you European lefties) for President.