‘My opponent looks like Saddam’s son’

THEY call it polling day but, in reality, polling has already being going on for weeks.

Florida opened its voting stations last week, but made a hash of its new electronic voting system.

In all, 30 US States allow people to cast their vote early. Some have introduced it for the first time and the turnout has been brisk. In Georgia, there are massive queues with voters waiting an average of three hours.

The Democrats vice presidential candidate John Edwards said yesterday that long lines and lots of younger faces among them would be a positive sign for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. But while the queues in Georgia were long yesterday they contained precious few young people. The reason for the long queues may be a more mundane one given that there are only a smattering of early polling stations in each State.

Speaking of John Edwards, his Senate seat (which he had to give up when he was named as the V-P candidate) looks like it will be lost to the Republicans.

One unusual aspect of the American electoral system is that the concept of a general election for Congress and Senate is unknown. Seats in both houses are decided in staggered elections that take place over the course of a Presidency.

While the Congress looks like it will remain under the control of the Grand Old Party (GOP), enough Senate seats are up for grabs this time to give the Democrats a chance to regain Senate control. However, they need to win an extra three seats as well as holding on to five of their seats that seem vulnerable. One of those is held by Edwards in NC, along with neighbouring South Carolina and Louisiana.

The welter of daily opinion polls over the past week have shown that neither candidate has been able to put clear water between himself and his rival. The latest poll yesterday from the Los Angeles Times gave Bush a lead of 1%, well within the margin of error which seems to be plus or minus four percent for most.

Tarring your opponent's reputation is par for the course in any electoral contest, but Senator Jim Dunning in Kentucky has surpassed himself. Dunning has told voters not to vote for his Democratic rival Daniel Mongiardo because outlandishly he "looks like one of Saddam Hussein's sons".

The English satire mag Private Eye has a long-running section called 'neologisms'. It gives the most pathetic examples of variations on the 'Brown is the new Black' type sentence. The neologism of the week over here repeated all over the place in the media is "Ohio is the new Florida".

The thesis is simple. The Democrats have registered thousands and thousands of new voters. The Republicans have contested the validity of many of them and have accused some registrations of being frauds.

Already the legal eagles have been called. If the gap between Bush and Kerry is as razor-thin as everybody's predicting, we could have a replay of 2000 in Florida where it took 36 days for the result to be officially declared.