As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states.

Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

Here is the meat of his piece: If you add up the provisional ballots (ignoring that most of them are invalid full stop) and spoiled ballots (ignoring that some people actually meant to vote for none or two presidents) it rougly equals the difference between the true result as recorded by the exit pollsters and the fake result you get by counting actual votes. He reapplies this um, analysis, to enough states until Kerry wins the electoral college.

This was done by a Harper's writer for the BBC for good reason. Any other set of readers would cancel their subscriptions.