"THE MARGIN OF LITIGATION"

From The American Spectator's blog:

If the public polling turns out to be wrong and we end up with an election result that is within the margin of litigation, things could get uglier than we've ever seen before. Even in 2000. Or so says Mike Carvin, a former Justice Department official who represented the Bush/Cheney campaign in Bush v. Gore.

"If this election is at all close, the litigation needed to straighten it out will dwarf anything we saw in Florida in 2000," Carvin said in a statement. "We've already seen challenges to the failure to count military ballots in Virginia and to exclude legitimate Republican poll watchers in Philadelphia. Coupled with the enormous validation problems caused by ACORN's dubious registrations, record turnout, new voting technology, and the provisional ballot provisions of the Help America Vote Act, we could see systemic post-election litigation challenges even where one candidate is tens of thousands voters ahead in a particular state...."

Carvin isn't connected to the McCain campaign, but this is clearly what the campaign and the right-wing media have been building up to for weeks. It seems likely that the thinking behind the Pennsylvania strategy was that if McCain couldn't win the state, he could at least make it close enough that an Obama victory based on a win in the state would forever seem fraudulent to a significant percentage of the rabble-roused public. And I'm sure the McCain people will find reasons to cast suspicion on any other Obama state win that's by 1% or so, or any relatively close win in a state that contains at least one large and largely African-American city. Maybe it will be a Hail Mary to try to snatch the win from Obama's grasp; undoubtedly it will be an attempt to taint an Obama win for all time.

How many electoral votes does Obama need to prevent this -- 350? 400? I think Obama will win tonight, but think the odds of McCain conceding tonight are no greater than 50-50.