Dear Lord, let it not be close

Tom Scarritt:

The most frightening apparition this Halloween is the specter of an election that will not die. For the sake of our nation, we should all pray for a clear winner on Tuesday. "I am really, really worried," Doug Lewis of the nonpartisan Election Center told The Wall Street Journal. "We're all on our knees - `Dear Lord, let the winner win big, whoever it is.'" Most of us can live with the notion that our misguided neighbors might pick the wrong candidate. That has happened plenty of times before, and we have worked harder to win the next time around. In any contest, though, it is much easier to accept the outcome if it is decided by the players on the field, rather than by a huddle of referees after the game.

I agree with this sentimate completely. While I strongly support Bush this election, even more than I want Bush to win, I want the election to go off smoothly and the margin of victory to outweigh any possible voter error or fraud. A bitterly contested, court decided election would probably be worse for our democracy than any other possible outcome. So my greatest hope for tomorrow, is that before I go to bed, we know who won. I predict though that this will be the case. Although the polls are very close, and this is true in several key swing states as well, I have a feeling that the country as a whole is going to make a clear decision one way or the other. I suspect that there will be at least a 3% difference in the popular vote and one side or the other getting at least 300 electoral votes, making any single swing state irrelevant in the final outcome. I dearly hope I am right.