mattlistener

Up late report: Ohio is too close to call. With how the other states are shaking out, the winner of Ohio will be the next President.

At this writing, Bush has an advantage of 144,000 in Ohio. The Democrats say there were as many as 250,000 provisional ballots cast. In 2000, around 90% of provisional ballots were ruled in the end to be valid and were counted. 90% of 250,000 is 225,000 provisional ballots that we might estimate will be added to the total.

So at the moment, the forecast comes down to whether we think there's a reason for the provisional ballots in Ohio to be skewed Democratic. There may be: as a result of an emergency stay Tuesday morning, partisan challengers were allowed in Ohio, one person from each party per district. The Republicans went into Democratic districts with a mandate to challenge eligibility wherever they had a plausible reason. The Democrats went in with a mandate to monitor and not challenge. Any voters who were not able to vote because of these challenges could still cast provisional ballots. (Though I have to wonder how many just walked away.)

If 90% of those provisional ballots are ruled valid, and 85% of them are for Kerry, he could be ahead in the final count.

Fortunately, no lawsuits are required at this point. Ohio's Secretary of State appears to be very rational and process-minded. There were no reports of widespread tampering or shenanigans in the state. Ohio will just crank through its various vote-counting protocols regarding every type of ballot in the mix.

Unfortunately, by Ohio state law the provisional ballots don't get counted until 11 days after the election. So we may be in for a good stretch of time where the whole country sees Bush as the popular-vote-winner and all-but-declared victor while Kerry refuses to concede until every vote is counted.

Ever the optomist...