Too Close To Call

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Kerry: Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Illinois, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, California, Oregon, New York, New Hampshire, Washington, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota

Bush: Oklahoma, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah, Missouri, Idaho, Florida, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Alaska, Arkansas, Nevada

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All times listed here are West Coast (PST) times.

12:00 AM, Final Tally

There are a lot of strong feelings about some of the networks — including Fox and NBC/MSNBC — calling the Ohio race for Bush late Tuesday night, without knowing how many provisional ballots were cast, while knowing that the best estimates suggested perhaps 250,000 provisional ballots were cast.

CNN took the high road on Ohio and insisted that there just wasn't enough information available to make the call. Deanna Zandt, representing election protection efforts in Columbus, Ohio, said: "It is outrageous for the media to make such a call when the voting situation in Ohio was so topsy turvy — many thousands of people waited for many hours to vote, primarily because there were not enough voting machines, despite repeated requests for more from election experts." There was also major controversy about the use of paper ballots to alleviate some of the long lines.

That's just one aspect of the “deja vu all over again” story that emerged on election night — with Ohio becoming the Florida of 2004, where Secretary of State Ken Blackwell consistently told people to take a deep breath and that by law the provisional ballots couldn't be counted for 10 days. But that was not all. Iowa basically went to sleep without a decision because of breakdowns in machines and tired workers.

In contrast to 2000, where Electoral College loser Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000, Bush could still lose the race — if Ohio were to flip to Kerry — despite a popular vote lead of more than 4 million. Strange how this Electoral College works.

For many enthusiastic Kerry supporters, November 2nd turned cruel. At mid-afternoon, euphoria swept through hundreds of thousands of people across the country, hard at work pulling voters and watching polls — as cell phones, instant messaging, and e-mails carried the news that a number of exit polls suggested a big Kerry victory; the Kerry campaign itself was confident, and pollster Zogy called it a strong win for Kerry. Several questions remain not the least of which is this: How did exit polls showing 3 or 4 point Kerry leads turn into a victory for Bush in Florida?

– Don Hazen

9:30 p.m., Nevada and New Hampshire Update

Kerry is looking very good in Nevada, where he’s leading in Washoe County. This is the Republican bastion that went for Bush by 9,000 votes in 2000 — Bush won Nevada by 21,000 votes. Kerry is of course leading in Clark County, which contains Las Vegas. This could be a huge surprise in the election.

In New Hampshire, as of 9:06 pst, Kerry is leading by 1% (7,000 votes or so) of the vote with 78% of the precincts reporting.

-Jan Frel

8 p.m., Women, Minorities Vote Kerry

Despite all the talk about security moms, it turns out that women broke decisively for Kerry. According to the CNN exit polls, 54 percent picked Kerry compared to 45 percent for Bush. Men, in comparison, picked Bush over Kerry, 52 to 47 percent.

A majority of African Americans (90 percent), Asian Americans (61 percent) and Latinos (56 percent) picked Kerry over Bush.

-Lakshmi Chaudhry

7 p.m., Youth Vote Breaks for Kerry

Exit polls indicate that voters aged 18-29 favor Kerry over Bush by 12 percentage points, while their counterparts favored Sen. Al Gore by only 4 percentage points in 2000, USA Today reports. But they made up roughly the same proportion of voters as they did in 2000.