Bush leads; only four states remain undecided
President George Bush is within 16 electoral votes of being re-elected and if he takes Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes, would wrap up the race. But the vote there, as it has been all night in many areas of the country, is tight and officials are reluctant to announce a winner.
Ohio's 20 electoral votes would bring Kerry within eight votes of the 270 needed for victory.
Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell said at a news briefing that it would be impossible to say who won Ohio until all of the state's outstanding provisional votes had been counted. Provisional ballots are those that were cast pending authentication.
Those ballots will not be counted until 11 days after the election, as state law requires, he said.
He told a briefing that there could have been as many as 175,000 provisional ballots cast, though the figure was speculation and will not be known for sure until all counties have reported.
In addition, Iowa, another state unable to call a close vote, announced it's having problems with counting machines in two small counties that could delay final results for at least one day, a top state official said early this morning.
Deputy Secretary of State Barb Huey said optical scan machines used to tally votes in Greene and Harrison counties, which have a combined total of about 15,000 registered voters, needed repairs.
Huey said the state was also still in the process of counting several thousand absentee ballots.
In addition to Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and New Mexico have yet to declare a winner and some officials are saying it may be tomorrow - at least - before the country has a victor in the presidential contest. Hawaii is the latest state to settle on a winner - John Kerry.
Earlier, Kerry had picked up Washington, Minnesota and New Hampshire, tightening the electoral college race that at one point had seen a solid Bush lead.
The President, however, has managed to keep his lead nearly all night. He won a crucial victory in the key battleground state of Florida in a tight contest this evening that boosted his chances. It was a carbon-copy battle of what's happening in other areas of the country in this year's presidential election's horse race.
The win in Florida — in the state that threw the last presidential election into turmoil in 2000 — coupled with Colorado had given the president a significant boost toward the goal of 270 electoral votes either candidate must win in order to be declared president. But Kerry's wins in Washington, Minnesota and New Hampshire narrowed the race once again, despite the president carrying a near 3 million-vote lead in the popular vote. At the moment, the President is leading in Ohio, although the margin is narrow with many votes still to be tabulated. Should the President hold his lead, Ohio's 20 electoral votes would put him within one electoral vote of the 270 votes need to win the presidency.
Oregon had gone to Kerry earlier this evening, as had California and Pennsylvania as polls closed throughout the West, but President George Bush added Arkansas, Idaho and Montana. The President has won 28 states so far to Kerry's 18, including the District of Columbia, according to the Associated Press.
The victories in Florida and Colorado had increased the president's lead in the electoral count, but that turned around with the latest tallies, officials say, and the race remains too tight to call. Some of the larger contested states have yet to report in because the vote is too close and officials are still forecasting a long night of vote-counting.
At the White House, where the President is watching the evening's returns with his family, he said, "I believe I will win, thank you very much. It's going to be an exciting evening."
And so far it has been. Americans have turned out in record numbers, swamping ballot boxes across the country. Some polling places have been required to stay open later than planned - two hours or more in some Ohio locations - to accommodate voters. So far, there are few reports of irregularities in the process anywhere in the country.
As the first polls closed earlier in the evening, the president picked up Georgia, Indiana and Kentucky — all GOP bastions — and Kerry won the Democratic stronghold of Vermont.
Bush later won West Virginia, a battleground state with five electoral votes and a long history of backing Democrats until the president took it in 2000. .
Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, got teary-eyed as he thanked his staff for a campaign's worth of work. "We made the case for change," he said after voting at the Massachusetts Statehouse.
Alongside the first presidential election since the Sept. 11 attacks, control of Congress was at stake as Bush's fellow Republicans sought to extend their hold on the House and Senate. A full roster of propositions and local offices filled ballots nationwide.
Exit polls suggested that slightly more voters trusted Bush to handle terrorism than Kerry. They were evenly split on whether they approved of the war in Iraq, with those backing the conflict heavily supporting Bush and those opposed strongly behind Kerry.
Interviews with voters as they left the polls suggested a majority believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. Those wrong-track voters overwhelmingly backed Kerry.
One in 10 voters were casting ballots for the first time and fewer than 10 percent were young voters, hardly the groundswell that experts had predicted. Kerry was favored by both groups, according to the surveys conducted for The Associated Press by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.
Turnout could turn out to be the great decider. Spending more money than ever to target voters, Democrats enlisted an army of paid organizers while Republicans issued marching orders by e-mail to legions of volunteers in the small towns and the farthest suburbs of battleground states.
Pre-election polls indicated the presidential race could be as close as 2000, when Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore but won the Electoral College count and the presidency after a ruling by the Supreme Court gave him Florida. The incumbent hoped to avoid the fate of his father - former President George H.W. Bush, who was bounced by voters in 1992 after waging war against Iraq and overseeing an ailing economy.
Officials predicted a turnout of 117.5 million to 121 million people, the most ever and rivaling the 1960 election in the percentage of eligible voters going to the polls. Voters welcomed an end to the longest, most expensive election on record.
"It's the only way to make the ads stop," Amanda Karel, 25, said as she waited to vote at a banquet hall in Columbus, Ohio.
Legions of lawyers and election-rights activists watched for signs of voter fraud or disenfranchisement. Complaints cropped up across the country, but voting seemed to be going smoothly overall.
Poring over exit polls and field reports, campaign strategists barked out 11th-hour orders to wrestle every vote from key states. At Bush's headquarters in Arlington, Va., aides identified low-turnout precincts and dispatched more walkers to them. In Boston, advisers gave Kerry a longer-than-expected list of TV interviews to conduct by satellite to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon.
That was an interesting list: Oregon was supposed to be safely Democratic and Colorado had seemed to be tilting toward Bush heading into Tuesday.
In the final hours of the campaign, Kerry's aides tried to boost turnout in Hispanic areas by having the candidate's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, do Spanish-language television interviews. Exit polls showed the Democrat winning the Hispanic vote, but not by as much as Gore in 2000.
Voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio received a wave of last-minute telephone calls as Kerry's strategists sought to nail down victories in those key Midwest battlegrounds.