Meanwhile, In Ohio...

The controversy is still steaming ahead. Keith Olbermann - the only mainstreamer who is bothering to look into this story - updates us.

LINK - Blackwell gets to wait until Monday to certify the state's vote, even though all 88 counties in the Buckeye State have finished their own confirmations. Data is still sketchy, but it turns out election officials accepted about 77% of the provisional ballots - about 121,000 of them. No statewide count of the provisionals yet, though results reported by one county - Franklin (that's Columbus), indicated that Senator Kerry had gotten nearly 7,700 of the more-than 12,000 provisional votes counted.

But of all the developments out of Ohio, the most provocative, clearly, is still stalled under the weight of its own paperwork. The Alliance for Democracy is not quite ready with its challenge to the vote yet. Lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, with who else but Reverend Jackson by his side today on the steps of the Ohio Supreme Court, said that the group hopes to file its election challenge tomorrow - if not, Monday - but it's not guaranteeing anything.

If and when it gets around to it, the Alliance will be asking one high court justice to set the election results aside, pending a full investigation and hearing. Arnebeck said today he believes that if all ballots were counted in what he calls a "traditional context," the outcome would not just swing from President Bush's 130,000 vote election night lead - it would swing all the way in the opposite direction, and give Kerry a 130,000 vote lead.
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Arnebeck sounded a little like a protestor in Kiev: "Our presidential election affects not just this country but all the citizens of the world. And therefore it's absolutely essential that the person who assumes the mantle of that office has the full confidence of our public and the world community that it was an honest election."

Amen.

Text boldened by me. The "Amen" is his.