WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- What if they held an election and no one accepted the results? It has never happened in more than 200 years of U.S. history. But there's always a first time.
One thing is already all too clear: Whomever wins on Nov. 2, unless the result is an incontestable landslide for either President George W. Bush or Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts in decisive battleground states, the losing side is going to contest close results in hard-fought races all across the nation.
Both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, mindful of the extraordinary complicated procedures and hairsbreadth cliffhanging returns and legal decisions that decided the 2000 presidential election, have made extensive plans to fight contested results through the legal system all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States if necessary.
It is already clear that these legal clashes will not be any simple repeat of what happened in November 2000. They will be on an incomparably vaster and more complex scale, and the level of bitterness and mutual distrust in both camps is already vastly greater than it was four years ago.
Several legal battlegrounds are already clear. There have been widespread allegations that in some states controlled by Republican governors, especially crucial Florida, black voters have been intimidated by state police or other authorities to prevent them voting in their full numbers.
Republicans in turn have accused Democrats of trying to flood polls in some states with voters who are convicted felons and therefore should be ineligible to vote.
There are already widespread concerns, especially in Ohio, about the reliability of the voting machines being used, raising the possibility that the famous "hanging chad" dispute in southern Florida four years ago may be chaotically repeated on a far larger scale in several states this time around.
And in Colorado, voters on Nov. 2 will also have to decide on a referendum proposal that if passed would immediately change the way the state delivers its Electoral College votes: Instead of all of them going to the victor in the state, who currently looks likely to be President Bush, they would be divided on a proportional basis. That could give Kerry a crucial edge in the overall national result, and Republicans would be sure to call foul.
Also, if passed the Colorado proposal would open the way for all the other states to propose similar or different amendments to the way they currently deliver their results to the Electoral College. And that could lead to constitutional chaos and a potential crisis of legitimacy, too.
A second conclusion at least can safely be made from these developments: Whatever happens after Nov. 2 will be unprecedented in the constitutional history of the U.S. republic. For even in the darkest, most chaotic and bitterly divisive times of U.S. history, significant numbers of voters or their political leaders have never before challenged the very conduct of the election process and the viability or plain honesty of the results that it threw up.
Four years ago, the Supreme Court's wafer-thin decision to end the recounts in crucial southern Florida counties and confirm Bush's tiny victory margin in the state was accepted with tolerance and even relief by virtually the entire country. There were no significant protests, no public violence and certainly no crisis of confidence or trust in the electoral system or the victorious party.
But that was then, and this is now. Both sides have fought a fierce partisan campaign very different from 2000, which appears now lackadaisical by contrast. Partisanship in both the GOP and Democratic campaigns is running at a level unprecedented at the very least since the era of public protests against the Vietnam War.
Also, the public mood in the 2000 election was concerned far more with moral issues such as cleaning up the image of the presidency after the Monica Lewinsky controversy that nearly swamped President Bill Clinton. But the country had enjoyed a long decade of peace and prosperity, and Bush ran as a compassionate conservative. It did not seem that important whether Bush or Vice President Al Gore won.
It is a very different story today: The differences between Bush and Kerry in this election and the parties behind them could not be more clearly defined or striking. There is far more passion in both camps than there was four years ago, and about the only thing both sides agree on is that this will be a crucially important, even defining election for many years to come and that who wins -- and loses -- matters enormously.
Therefore, the general willingness to compromise or step back from contesting the results to the bitter end that Gore displayed four years ago no longer exists -- on either side.
This means the long-drawn-out legal tussles that already seem inevitable after the election are likely to have far more direct and disturbing effects. Whichever side wins is likely to face the problem of alienation and even fury from the other half of the country. Mass popular protests cannot be predicted as inevitable, but they certainly appear possible.
The best outcome for the election -- but unfortunately the least likely one at the moment -- would be if either the president or Kerry won a decisive victory with clear margins in key states so that decisive allegations of winning the victory by improprieties or unfair suppression of accredited voters could be ruled out or judged insubstantial when weighed against the overall results.
There are ample precedents in U.S. history for losers in presidential elections to be sore and embittered by their rejection, being forced to swallow the bitter pill by the scale of the defeat they were handed. Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush all won such decisive victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College that there was no doubt they enjoyed broad national support for their often controversial policies. Even in three-way races, Clinton's pluralities in 1992 and 1996 were clear and universally recognized.
However, Bush has run a relentlessly partisan presidency despite winning election with half a million fewer votes than his opponent. So far, almost all opinion polls suggest that neither he nor Kerry will be able to score a knockout victory over the other on Election Day.
Over the past four years the United States has grown increasingly partisan and divided, but it has remained civil and stable. A narrowly won victory by either Bush or Kerry, if accepted without serious complaint by the losing side, would ensure a continuation of that happy state. But any series of bitter, complicated and long-drawn-out wrangles through the courts could cause far more serious damage to popular respect for the basic democratic process than anyone can yet imagine.
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