Just think: If a little more than half of the voting population in each state is capable of rational thought, by this time tomorrow we’ll have a new president-elect.

Not that we’re necessarily going to know that by this time tomorrow. We haven’t seen a spate of election-related lawsuits here in Pennsylvania … yet. Thirty minutes to the west, however, is going to be interesting. A judge threw out a request by the Republicans to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,600 people at the polls, for the express purpose of challenging voters as they come in. The Democrats were going to have a couple thousand there as well, although they said their folks would just be observing.

And that’s just the latest dust-up. Last week the Summit County board of elections threw out around 900 challenges of registered Democrats because the first dozen or so people to testify admitted that they had no actual knowledge of the people they were challenging, and had filed based on direction from the state Republican committee. After one woman was advised by her lawyer to stop answering questions for fear she might incriminate herself, the bipartisan board got a little irritated and threw all the challenges out.

Even the guy who is supposed to be overseeing this mess, the secretary of state (Blackwell is his name), isn’t above throwing himself into the mix. Besides supporting the Republican efforts to have challengers at polling places, he is about the only state-level politician supporting Issue 1, which A) would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and B) make it illegal for any governement entitiy in the state to extend benefits to non-married partners. Ohio already has a law banning gay marriage, so the first part is an annoying redundancy. The second part is potentially harmful enough that the governor and both U.S. senators are urging people to vote it down. The economic impact impact would be horrible, but Blackwell doesn’t seem too worried about that.

Things in PA seem calm by comparison. Arlen Specter will be re-elected, probably by a healthy margin. I’m predicting that a 28-year-old Republican kid will upset a Democratic incumbent in the state house of representatives race I’m covering. I think I’m going to eat my weight in chicken wings from Robert’s Roadside. And I think Kerry will win a tight race here — eventually. When I got to be early Wednesday, we’re still not going to know diddley about who president will be in 2005. But I do think a fix is going to be a lot tougher this time around.