Open election night thread

Comment on the election returns here. Some useful links: Florida’s Secretary of State presidential vote counter; Ohio’s Secretary of State presidential vote counter; Iowa’s Secretary of State presidential vote counter Wisconsin’s Election Bard, alas, “does not provide unofficial results.” UPDATE: Megan McArdle cheers me up — a swap of free-trader Jim DeMint for uber-protectionist Fritz ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Comment on the election returns here. Some useful links:

Comment on the election returns here. Some useful links:

Florida’s Secretary of State presidential vote counter; Ohio’s Secretary of State presidential vote counter; Iowa’s Secretary of State presidential vote counter

Wisconsin’s Election Bard, alas, “does not provide unofficial results.” UPDATE: Megan McArdle cheers me up — a swap of free-trader Jim DeMint for uber-protectionist Fritz Holling in South Carolina is a good thing for foreign economic policy. ANOTHER UPDATE: James Carville just said on CNN that Bush has the upper hand — Kerry needs to “draw an inside straight” to win. YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Four idle thoughts before I go to sleep:

1) No terrorist attacks times with the election — an undisputably good thing; 2) As Kevin Drum points out, “Here’s some good news: as near as I can tell from scannng the web, surfing the news channels, and reading email from folks like PFAW, this year’s election is looking pretty clean.” 3) I, for one, take Jeff Jarvis’ pledge. 4) Unless there are truly some massive adjustments in vote counts, the exit polls were skewed towards Kerry.

OK, TWO MORE THOUGHTS: First, I just heard Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State say (quite cogently) on ABC that the provisonal ballots cannot be counted until 11 days after the election. So if it’s close there, and everything else breaks as expected, it could be a long two weeks. That said, the current numbers have Bush up by 191,000 votes with about 80% of the vote counted. Even if there are 130,000-150,000 provisional votes, Kerry would have to close the gap significantly for those votes to really tip the election. Second, Fox News is now calling Ohio for Bush. Intriguingly, their vote totals are higher than the Ohio Secretary of State’s figures. FINAL UPDATE: Good morning!! OK, if this count of provisional ballots is accurate (link via Jim Lindgren), the total nomber of provisional votes is still less than Bush’s margin of victory in the counted votes. Which means Bush takes Ohio, which means the worst he can do would be a 269-269 split, which Bush would win in the House — which would be appropriate, since he won the popular vote by more than 3.5 million votes. So… danieldrezner.com calls it for Bush [Yes!! You beat CNN!!–ed. No, wait!! According to CNN:

[Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell] said he could not immediately put an estimate on the number of those ballots but said 250,000 might not be out of the realm of possibility. While he said the exact number of provisional ballots was unknown, he said it is “trending toward 175,000.”

That is larger than Bush’s current margin — but those votes would have to go to Kerry by 85-15 for it to matter. This Daily Kos e-mail suggests that this is how that vote split in 2000, but that would still be an extraordinary outcome. So I’m sticking with my call.]

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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