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Heh, it's almost like i"m updating this every 2 days now instead of everyday.
For all my international visitors, or for people who never watch the news, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper,
the United States presidential election results STILL aren't known. 24 hours after the polls in Florida (the
state I live in), they are recounting votes to figure out who won. Due to the way our electoral process is set up, it
has ened up that whoever gets the majority of votes in Florida wins the US election. The "unofficial" count puts Bush up by about 1,700 votes out of 3 million cast.
However they are currently recounting, and there are still a couple of votes in the mail that were mailed in from US
citizens located in foreign countries. The recount is supposed to be done by Thursday (Nov 9) evening, so hopefully
we'll know who won the election by then. However if it's still super close, the votes coming in from foreign countries
don't have to be in till Nov 17th, so it might be 9 more days before we know who won.
The other interesting aspects of this is that Gore won the US
popular vote, meaning that out of all the votes cast he got more than Bush did, by about 200,000 votes. But due to our electoral college system, the
popular vote doesn't matter one little bit. Hopefully the attention brought to this will lead to the electoral college
being abolished, so that the American
people can directly elect our president. The other twists in Florida is the
usual cases of missing/tampered/fixed ballot boxes that you find when a race is close, but also in Palm Beach county,
the way the ballot was set up was semi-confusing to the old people who live there, so apparently quite a few of them
accidently voted for Buchanen instead of Gore. However as far as I've heard, there isn't much that can be done about it,
although some citizens have brought a lawsuit against the electoral supervisor about it.
For being the first presidential election I paid close attention to, this is one exciting election. I hope Bush can pull
it off.
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