First a confession. I've been up until 4:30am (Tokyo time) every night this week browsing this site and writing diaries of my own. This has resulted in my getting only a few hours of sleep each day. But it's also resulted in my not being able to remember if this was my idea or not. I honestly can't remember if it's something I read in someone's diary, if it's something I thought of myself, or both. Anyway, here it goes.
If Bush does not secure an Electoral College victory, he is going to use Gore's legitimate challenge of the 2000 Florida count as an excuse to challenge every single close count in every battleground state. It won't matter if there isn't good reason to suspect a miscount. It won't matter that they all said in 2000 that Gore should just concede the loss. Nothing will matter for them except winning.
This is likely to happen even if Kerry wins by a landslide EC count. If they can't win by challenging the numbers, their strategy will be to cast sufficient doubt on the numbers to rob Kerry of his legitimacy. That will be their strategy. They won't cancel the election because it will be too dramatic and might frighten non-voters enough to make them vote when the election is actually held.
Instead they'll try to reverse or taint a Kerry victory. They'll say, "the Democrats did it to Bush in 2000, so we're doing it to Kerry in 2004."
We need to be on the look out for this and have some plan in place to counter it when it happens.
If someone has already posted about this, sorry.