The polling booths in most of the country had closed and the two candidates were deadlocked. Months of heated battle boiled down to a difference of less than 200 votes. This was the closest presidential election in anyone's memory, and an entire nation was glued to their televisions. When all the votes had finally been cast, the result still shrouded in mystery, the two candidates merely conceded defeat.

In the end, Worker's World party candidate Monica Moorehead received 4,245 votes, a mere 148 votes ahead of 11th place finisher David McReynolds of the Socialist party. As far as I know, neither demanded a recount. And both of them only narrowly defeated the 12th place finisher, someone called None of the Above, who took 3,315 votes.

And Mr. de l'Above was not without worries of his own. The further down the list one looked, the race only got tighter and tighter, culminating in a tie for last. Joe Schriner and Gloria Strickland, both write-in candidates, somehow polled exactly zero votes apiece. If you can't even get your own mother to vote for you, you should not be president.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, George "Your Ad Here" Bush was on the phone with his younger brother Jeb, threatening him with noogies and wedgies if he let Florida fall into enemy hands. In Nashville, Al "Huggy Bear" Gore was in a hotel surrounded by his closest supporters, who turned out to be the only people in his home state of Tennessee who voted for him, wringing his hands behind his back in a last-ditch attempt to look "presidential." Both men were agitated because the race was turning out to be the closest of the modern era.

I hate politics, but I have to admit, this was exciting. The major networks declared both men winners and subsequently retracted both declarations, sparking a bidding war on e-bay for early-morning editions of the New York Post bearing red-letter "Bush Wins" headlines. After the Networks finished making asses of themselves, it became clear that only a few hundred votes seperated the two front-runners with several thousand ballots pending in the winner-take-all state of Florida. It was at this point that the humbled pundits stopped trying to pick the winner, and instead held hands and struck up a few thousand choruses of "Every Vote Counts."

Such drama!--my only regret was that there had to a winner. The networks couldn't decide who that was, and apparently, neither could Florida. In the Great Orgy that is the U.S. presidential race, Florida had only achieved a partial election. What the hell was going on down there?

At first, I blamed Florida's slow returns on sloth. Florida is hot, and most Floridians are not in a hurry to do anything, unless they find themselves outdoors, in which case they hurry to get back into an air-conditioned room, where they promptly sit down and play gin rummy. Then I learned that they were waiting for several thousand absentee ballots, which could take several days to arrive. My sincere apologies to Florida.

Then some people starting saying that there were some voting "irregularities". Boxes full of uncounted ballots were turning up in churches. According to the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, there are more than 15,000 dead people on active voting rolls state-wide. And some of the living voters complained about the layout of the ballot itself, calling it "deceptive, misleading and confusing." Though this sounds more like a Cambodian election, it was uniquely American in one crucial aspect: some of those misled voters filed lawsuits.

Approximately six million votes were cast in Florida, and 19,120 of them (about 1 in 300) were thrown out because those people had voted more than once. Florida has a punch-card style ballot, with the candidates' names in two columns on either side with hole marks in the center to be punched. "The ballot is very straightforward," said Clay Roberts, the director of the Florida State Deptartment of Elections, "You follow the arrow, you punch the location. Then you have voted for who you intend to elect." But some people, for one reason or another, punched two holes instead of one.

I'm with Clay on this one. It seems pretty simple to me. And apparently it was pretty simple to the 5,980,880 Floridians who successfully navigated the "deceptive" ballot and managed to vote for the candidate of their choice.

If you pick 300 people at random, you are likely to find at least one complete moron in the bunch. That 19,120 out of six million people voted for the wrong person should not surprise anyone. And there shouldn't be any lawsuits either. My advice to Florida: just tell those people that their man won--they won't know the difference. And please, please revoke their driver's licenses immediately.

There was also some controversy in St. Louis, Missouri. Polling places were kept open an hour later there than in other parts of the state to accomodate voters who work late. Republicans complained that this gave an edge to Democrats in St. Louis, which is a Democratic stronghold, and promptly filed lawsuits.

Unlike Florida, the returns in Missouri came in on time and the results in their Senate race were decisive. Mel Carnahan, the state's beloved Democratic governor, defeated the incumbent Republican candidate John Ashcroft.

Ashcroft vowed to continue the fight in court, partly because of the scandal in St. Louis and partly because his opponent is not an "inhabitant" of the state from which he was elected, which is required by the U.S. Constitution.

Carnahan had no comment, mainly because he died one month before the election in a plane crash.

I stopped paying attention to politics a few years ago, then it went and got all interesting on me. I first took notice when Jesse "The Body" Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota. Then a former First Lady got elected to the Senate for the first time in U.S. history. Then Bush and Gore fought to a virtual tie, joining a Senator-elect from Missouri in limbo. What's next?

I can't say I know, but I find all this encouraging. Does this mean my fellow Americans are finally learning to see politics in it's true light, that is, as a complete joke? It's too soon to tell, but part of me would like to see us follow the lead of Italy and elect a porn star to the House of Representatives. Bill Clinton did his level best to bring farce to high office, but I fear we are a long way from seeing a Cicciolina in the Senate chamber anytime soon.

The election in Missouri has understandably raised a few important legal questions, not the least of which is what it means to "inhabit" a state. And there are other questions which politcal thinkers would be lax to disregard. For example: Will future votes on the Senate floor be conducted with everyone holding hands in a circle, house lights dimmed and candles lit, while Dionne Warwick attempts to "channel" the votes of the deceased? Would Carnahan's widow, who will fill his seat, vote with a Ouija board? And if so, what safeguards will be put in place to ensure that American trade policy is not illegally influenced by dead foreign lobbyists?

American politics has always confused me. What exactly is the difference between a liberal Republican and a conservative Democrat? Why isn't Washington D.C. part of Maryland or Virginia? And the electoral college system makes even Cambodian elections seem perfectly sensible.

But now American politics seems to have shifted from confusing to just plain weird, which suits me just fine. It's gotten me very excited for the next election. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't voted since 1992, but I do plan to vote in 2004...for Mahatma Ghandi. Or Abraham Lincoln. I'm still undecided.