270

There have already been instances of early voting problems in states such as West Virginia and Florida, and I'm getting worried about what election night will look like.

West Virginia had several reports of paperless electronic voting machines switching votes from Barack Obama to John McCain. Florida had three-hour waiting lines for early voting. There are serious concerns about voter registration rolls being purged of valid registrations.

My biggest worry is that late on election night, the electoral map will be stuck on something like 264 votes for Obama, and several important swing states will have suffered enough voting irregularities to throw their results into doubt and delay them from being certified.

We'll go into a nightmarish scenario similar to 2000, where recounts, protests, and teams of sleazy lawyers will be involved. Republicans will loudly shriek that ACORN is behind the confusion to help distract from the obvious voting machine tampering and illegal registration purges that will have occurred. In my very worst scenario, we'll go into late November or early December without a clear winner, and the election will end up before the Supreme Court.

We can all guess how that will turn out.

The only way we can avoid this scenario is to ensure enough people in enough states vote overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. If he wins by a large enough margin in those battleground states the GOP has targeted for the worst of their foul shenanigans, Obama will blast through the magical 270 electoral vote barrier early enough in the evening that we'll get to see and hear John McCain make his concession speech before we drop off from exhaustion.

At least, that's what I'm hoping for.