This election may prove to be more disputed and more controversial than the election in 2000 which left this country bitterly seperated. The seperation ended with September 11th, after which point even the most bitter democrats accepted Bush as our Commander in Chief. However, can all the democrats take it again if the supreme court, which is republican, chooses Bush as the president again. If this election ends with one candidate winning the popular vote, but not the electoral college vote, I will be shouting, along with many others, for the scrapping of the electoral college. Can this country deal with such an event again? And what if the voting system fails, especially with the new technology being used? What if a terrorist attack targets the power infrastructure, preventing people from getting to the polls, and in many circumstances from the votes being cast and counted. Would a terrorist attack before or during the election scare away voters? Would such an attack change the candidate people choose? I am NOT looking forward to the coming month. Please let election season be over, and please let the victor win by a wide margin.
Below is an excerpt from the Nytimes, the whole article can be viewed at http://nytimes.com/2004/10/17/weekinreview/17brod.html?
The likelihood of trouble at the nation's 200,000 polling places may be greater in 2004 than in any year in memory. Absentee and mail-in ballots, provisional voting, redrawn districts, untrained poll workers, millions of first-time voters and unfamiliar new technology are all conspiring to create a potential electoral nightmare in a tight contest.
The two major parties have brigades of lawyers ready to file legal actions at the first signs of irregularity at the polls. Already, lawsuits are challenging voter registration procedures in several states, and more litigation is sure to come anywhere that it might affect the outcome.
In every American hamlet, city, county and state, elections officials are praying, "Please, don't let it be close here."
All of which leads to the question: Could the country stand another Florida? How deep would the political and psychological damage be?
The debacle last time left the nation's electoral institutions bruised but relatively intact. Academic researchers say the sharply divided Supreme Court of December 2000, vilified by many for the way it decided Bush v. Gore, appears to have regained the faith of a majority of the public.
But scars remain. Questions about the legitimacy of the Bush presidency and the fairness of the 2000 election have never died. Many Democratic voters have nursed feelings of anger and disenfranchisement for the past four years. Partly as a result, the 2004 campaign has been among the most bitter in decades.
Some scholars and political combatants believe a second contested election could open lasting fissures in American society. They fear that the red-blue political geography of the country could become imprinted on the national psyche for years to come, squelching hopes for bipartisan cooperation in governing the country.
Before 2000, the last time the nation suffered such a disputed presidential election was in 1876, when the wounds of the Civil War were still fresh and the public had no appetite for a pitched partisan battle, said David Herbert Donald, an emeritus professor of history at Harvard University and a scholar of the presidency. That dispute cooled soon after Rutherford B. Hayes, declared the winner by a bipartisan commission, assumed office in 1877.
