Day 42 – Washington DC – Prediction time

04 November 2008 | 11:00 - By Charles Firth

Well, we're almost finished, thank goodness. What a dull campaign this has been...

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Nothing notable nor groundbreaking has happened during the whole enterprise. Mark my words: history will chalk this up as one of the more forgettable elections of the modern era.

While I'm making predictions, I might as well throw my hat in the ring: this election is going to go down to the wire, with McCain squeaking it in. America is simply not ready for a Muslim president.

All the polls have been predicting an Obama landslide – but if history has taught us anything it's that the polls can get it wrong. Most polls tipped Kerry in 2004, and even the actual poll on the day had Gore winning in 2000, until the Supreme Court corrected that mistake. But that won't happen again. Newly installed computerized voting machines have been correcting people's votes on the fly in many battleground states, which means the correct result can be tallied without judicial intervention (like Google, you type in "Obama" and it comes up "Did you mean McCain?" – it's amazing what technology can do nowadays). And with no paper trail, there'll be nothing for sore losers to take to the Supreme Court anyway.


We've been hanging around outside pre-polling stations and met many people who have been queuing hours to vote, especially in the browner parts of town. But think about it: the results in many of those booths are a foregone conclusion: Obama will romp it home. That means it's less important to collect every vote than a booth that may go either way. So what if a few people give up rather than queue for five hours? It won't change the overall result at that booth.

Prepolling has fallen 64/36 in favour of Obama. He doesn't need any more help. Democracy is supposed to be about fairness. The only fair thing to do is to even up the race for McCain. Which is why all those self-correcting machines and long queues actually show that America is the greatest and fairest democracy of all.

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About this Blog

Charles Firth Charles Firth's months in America taught him many things – that a country that touts democracy doesn’t practice it, that the spectacle is more important than the message, that 54 oz Slurpees don’t mix well with expensive and vital equipment. It was a long, arduous, uphill battle, but he had a story to tell and through it all persevered with a singular goal in mind – meeting George Negus on the publicity tour.

 
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