Dan Rather AS THE clock ticks down to what many have called the most important presidential election in a generation, more and more people are asking: Is it ticking down to Election Day, or to some unknown point days - even weeks - later? Before the 2000 election, we thought we knew how these things went -- as polls closed around the country, a picture would begin to form of which candidate for president was winning the states he needed in order to prevail.
By the end of Election Night or sooner the picture would become clearer, to a point where we could feel comfortable projecting a winner.
LEGAL FIGHTS
Well, we all know how that turned out last time around, and how the protracted legal fights after Election Day 2000 have tempered our modern understanding of how a presidential election can proceed and be decided. This year, with the growing practice of early voting in many states, we've seen Election Day sprawl ahead of November 2; will legal challenges after Nov. 2 now turn Election Day into Election Season?
There are indications that they could. If public-opinion polls are to be believed, this year's contest of Bush vs. Kerry is every bit as close as Bush vs. Gore. As in 2000, the final outcome will likely hinge on the results in a few key states where the race also seems to be tick-tight. And, armed with the knowledge of what happened in 2000 -- that the judicial branch ultimately played a pivotal role -- both the Democrats and the Republicans are, as the saying goes, layered up and ready for a fight.
There are arguably no two states that figure more prominently in this year's electoral calculus than Ohio and Florida. No Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio, and after the battles of 2000, Florida, with its 27 electoral votes, has gained a reputation as the mother of all swing states. Right now both states seem to be up in the air, and, in both, the legal battles are already under way.
In Ohio, Republicans have challenged more than 35,000 new voter registrations, setting in motion a scramble to rule on the legitimacy of these registrations before Election Day. In Florida, where there have already been reports of problems with early voting and requested absentee ballots not arriving, Democrats have taken the lead in filing a number of lawsuits charging that Republican officials are seeking to disenfranchise minority voters.
For those hoping for the election to be settled at the ballot box rather than in the courts, these news items can provide little comfort. Further complicating the picture this year is a part of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 mandating that states provide provisional ballots to would-be voters whose registration status is in doubt on Election Day. In states where the margin of "victory" for either Kerry or Bush is less than the number of provisional ballots, look for fierce legal fights to emerge over whether provisional ballots should be counted and, if so, which ones.
ELECTION DAYS OR WEEKS
One might well ask how, after what happened in 2000, we could possibly find ourselves at such a pass. Will Election Day 2004 stretch into Election Days or even Weeks? Former Solicitor General Theodore Olson has experience in such matters, having successfully led the Bush legal team in 2000. Here's what he recently wrote on the subject: "The best chance for the American electorate to avoid a post-election repeat of 2000 is to re-elect President Bush decisively -- or to defeat him overwhelmingly." And if American voters fail to speak with a clear voice, the lawyers are waiting in the wings.
Dan Rather is a television broadcaster
