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On Jan 6, Congress counts the electoral votes. The electoral college has already voted in mid December--for Bush. :(
What happens now is just the counting. John Conyers (D MI) has been hinting he's planning to challenge the Ohio electors, claiming the election there was a fraud, and that their votes shouldn't be counted, pending investigation.
If a senator joins in his challenge , then both houses of congress talk for two hours, and they both vote separately on the Ohio slate. DU is trying to draft a senator, but I'm pessimistic. It'll be a straight majority vote in each house. Unless both houses vote to reject the Ohio slate, it'll be counted and Bush wins. Nobody seriously expects that we'll win the vote: most democrats have apparently indicated they don't take the challenge very seriously. It really hurt us badly that Kerry conceeded: it's very hard to stand up and try to swing an election for someone who admits he really lost.
I think honestly we've been making a major strategic mistake here. Let's suppose we actually get a senator to challenge. We'll get immediately voted down by a catastropic margin <98-2 in the senate, probably>. It'll get five minutes on the nightly news, and nobody will remember. The GOP will spin it as "so-and-so wanted to throw out several million votes to put Kerry over the top". They're much more ruthless about spin, and they control the media. This sort of head-on attack on the GOP machine will just give the left a bloody nose. We ought to see if we can't find something cleverer to do.
I'm sorry, but that's how I see it.
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