Waiting on Ohio's Votes
130,566 votes seperate Bush from Kerry in Ohio, but the Kerry campaign wants to wait until the provisional votes are counted. With only a few counties remaining to be included in the total, there are only 135,149 provisional votes. However, Summit county (which includes Akron) and several other small counties have not submitted their provisional totals. Don't expect them to significantly push the number higher. Cuyahoga County, which is much larger, only had 24,788 provisionals. So maybe there is 160,000-140,000 provisionals - but even then many of them will be thrown out, and those that remain will be split by some indeterminate proportion between the two, but Kerry would have to win close to 100% of those votes to close the gap (assuming enough provisionals don't get thrown out to make the gap impossible to close). So for Kerry to win the following must happen

1) Get a lot of provisional votes from the few remaining counties
2) Hope that an extremely large percentage (maybe 90% - depends on how many more provisionals are found) of these votes don't get thrown out
3) Hope that the provisionals break almost 10 to 1 (or higher if not a lot remain after being eliminating the invalid counties) for Kerry
4) Hope that this pulls the race close enough for a recount, which could possibly make up the difference
5) Hope that in the event of such a recount, rumors of massive fraud in key democrat cities designed to raise Kerry's vote total don't turn out to be true, or at least demonstratable.

Is all this possible? Of course! But technically speaking, it is all always possible that if you take a 1000 monkeys, give them typewriters and several years, one of them will compose by random hitting of the keys the complete works of shakespear.

But being an ohioan who has suffered from the drive, the fumble, jose mesa's game 7 implosion, a myriad of michael jordan last minute shots, I don't like this possible thing, no matter how long the odds are. With that in mind, I have to keep reminding myself - patience, patience.