Temporary Votelock

Living in Japan, I'm up for most of the counting part of this thing. Luckily, today is Culture Day, a national holiday in Japan. Nice of them, eh?

At this point, it looks like Ohio might be close enough that provisional and absentee ballots could make a difference; Bush is ahead by about 135,000 votes, but Kerry claims there are 250,000 absentee and provisional ballots uncounted. I'm not sure how he knows that because even the Ohio election officials don't know how many there are ... Anyway, if Bush doesn't pull out enough to make the uncounted ballots irrelevant, we'll have 11 days to wait to find out who wins.

Here's CNN's results page.

No matter who wins the electoral college vote, Bush has won the popular vote. He currently has more than 3.5 million votes more than Kerry, and there aren't enough uncounted votes out there for Kerry to catch up. Of course, it's not about the popular vote, and if Kerry wins the electoral vote, I'll accept him as the legitimate president of the USA. However, if Kerry does win, I will enjoy torturing my anti-Bushite friends with that every chance I get.

However the presidential race comes out, the Republicans now have a decent majority in both the House (228-198-1 with 8 races still undecided) and Senate (53-44-1 with 2 undecided). Even if Bush loses, the Republicans will still retain a lot of power.