I love it when news commentators have nothing to say but plenty of time to fill. Jeff Greenfield and the boys on CNN are telling us that money is important in winning an election.

The CNN Election Night set looks like the producers of Tron had a garage sale.

At this moment, it's all still too close to call. We have a lot of news sources tossing out exit poll data along with the caveat that it doesn't mean a lot. Hey, if it doesn't mean a lot, why are you reporting it?

Part of me hopes that the winner, whoever it is, wins by a large enough margin that no one can say he didn't win for real. But another part of me kinda hopes that one guy wins the electoral vote and the other guy wins the popular. Maybe if it happens again, it will finally rid us of the silly Electoral College and move up to just awarding the presidency to the guy who gets the most votes.

The Zogby Poll has just predicted Kerry will win with at least 311 electoral votes. I don't particularly believe that number and I'm wondering why Zogby made such a call at 3 PM on Election Day. Were any of his clients asking for a projection only hours before we have actual numbers? No other pollster seems to have made a "final call" after late Monday…why did Zogby put his ass on the line like that? Is it just that the stats he has are overwhelming and he wanted the prestige of being the only major pollster to forecast a Kerry landslide? Perhaps…but doesn't he run the risk of being laughed out of his profession if Bush wins?

I'm not saying he's right or wrong…though if he's right, it will mean enormous bragging rights. There have been others, of course, who have been saying for days or weeks that Bush can't lose or that Kerry will win big, but those all strike me as voodoo projections. If they're right, they'll be right the way one of those Magic Eight Balls is intermittently right. Years ago, I worked on a "reality" TV show that occasionally gave air time to people who claimed, via psychic means or otherwise, to be able to forecast the future. We were lobbied many a time by someone who had proof they'd correctly predicted the scores of all seven World Series games or the Dow Jones closing numbers for the last month. Closer investigation revealed that they were operating on Dumb Luck. The lady who called all the World Series games was part of a "Psychic Society" where several thousand alleged seers each predicted the totals…and she was the one who was right. (She thought it proved psychic powers. We thought it proved The Law of Averages.)

Zogby isn't quite in that category. He's using actual polls and voting models and a methodology built on science. Still, I can't help but think it's not as exact a science as he makes it out to be…so if he's right, there'll be a certain amount of luck in there. And whatever Internet sites prove to have gotten it right will have been even luckier.

I'm almost disappointed: No long lines, no exit pollsters, no poll watchers, no Michael Moore cameramen, no excitement. Guess this is what happens when you live in a non-battleground state.

One lady was ahead of me, and she wasn't even a voter in our precinct. She was a caregiver for a local resident who's recuperating from a recent heart attack. It was so recent that he wasn't able to request an absentee ballot but he was, nonetheless, determined to vote that day. She brought down his driver's license and asked if there was any way she could take a ballot to him, let him mark it and then bring it back. Getting out of bed and down to the polling place might, she said, be bad for his health. "He says he's going to vote, even if he has to crawl here on his hands and knees."

The precinct workers told her they were sorry but there was no way they could let her take a ballot out of the building…especially someone else's ballot. She sighed and said, "Okay. I'm going to have to rent a wheelchair and I'll bring him here in an hour or so." (Handily, there's a place that rents and sells wheelchairs two doors down from where we vote.)

I voted. It was odd, the other day when I marked my ballot and again today when I voted, to take my attention away from Bush vs. Kerry and to focus on propositions, judges, etc. I think I voted to okay a bond issue to raise money to do stem-cell research in Indian Casinos.

On the way out, I told the folks working there I'd expected to wait in a long line. One said, "If you'd come in at 8 AM, you would have. All those people, stopping on their way to work…"

Another precinct worker said, "I'm telling you, it wasn't that. It was all those stories on the news about how you'll have to wait in line two, three hours to vote. Everyone wanted to get here early."

As I left, a man was picking up his ballot and I heard him mutter, "Wish I could cast this back in Ohio where it'll do more good." He should be glad he didn't have to crawl to our polling place on his hands and knees.

For those of you interested, here's what's up with the broken battery door on my Nikon Coolpix 990…

I called the Nikon company. A guy there said, "Yeah, those break a lot." Said to send it in for repairs and they'll give me an estimate, which will likely be in the $150 range. With no guarantee it won't break again tomorrow.

I called the local Nikon authorized service shop. A guy there said, "Yeah, those break once in a while." If I drive it out to Encino and then come back a few days later, I can get it fixed for around $90. With no guarantee it won't break again tomorrow.

I called a large camera shop that's just down the street and has a repair division. A guy there said, "Yeah, those break a lot. If you bring it in, we can fix it for around $90 but it really isn't worth it. That camera's getting to be obsolete and I wouldn't put any more money in it. We sell a black paper tape for around $5 a roll that people have used to hold the camera door shut. It's not perfect but it'll let you use the camera.

Guess what I'm considering.

There's still time to get a bet down on Alan Keyes.

What you should know about exit polls. Courtesy of the Mystery Pollster.

Okay, the October Surprise was that there was no October Surprise. It's starting to look like the November Surprise is that if you go to vote, you'll still be in line when it comes time for the December Surprise.

In the midst of all this election talk and a killer deadline I had to meet, I somehow managed to miss noting the death of Vaughn Meader, the man who played John F. Kennedy on what was at the time, the fastest-selling record album ever. That The First Family was a comedy album made that even more remarkable. And of course, it is remarkable how short-lived was Mr. Meader's tour of duty as a comedian. When J.F.K. died, so did the career of his impersonator. It is said that the first time Lenny Bruce took the stage following the Kennedy Assassination, his opening line was either, "Phew! Vaughn Meader!" or "Poor Vaughn Meader," depending on which version you believe. (More vulgar permutations of the line have also been quoted.)

A couple of things should be noted about The First Family. One, which obituaries like this one did not make clear, is that Meader did not write or even conceive the album. Writer-producers Earle Doud and Bob Booker did. Meader was just the actor they hired to play Kennedy. He was one of several young performers around who were then doing impersonations of the Chief Exec, and he was the one Doud and Booker selected.

Another thing that should be noted is that, for all its success, The First Family was not very good and not very memorable, nor were its sequels and many imitators, many of which were also by Doud and/or Booker. Everyone bought the album but I doubt very many listened to it a second time. It was a fad and not a very long one, at that. I suspect that even if Kennedy had not been shot, Meader's career would have taken the same trajectory, albeit slower. He tried a few non-Kennedy albums later and they're just as unlistenable as The First Family.

The most interesting thing about the whole album is that it existed…and in so doing, it knocked down a lot of taboos relating to political comedy in this country. Initially, record companies were afraid of it, especially ABC Records, which rejected it on the advice of Jim Hagerty, an executive with the firm. Hagerty had worked as Dwight Eisenhower's press secretary and he thought the whole idea of mocking the President of the United States was just this side of treason. But the small company that finally put it out had very little to lose, and when Kennedy himself gave it a boost by (reportedly) being a good sport and playing it for his friends, the thing took off. Thereafter, its sheer financial success endorsed the propriety of lampooning politicians, and established the market for it. That, I think, is the enduring legacy of Vaughn Meader. And since I believe mocking politicians is a noble pastime, I think that's a darn good legacy.

And now, less than three hours after moving Florida into Bush's column, the Slate electoral cartographers have moved it back to Kerry and also shifted Wisconsin to Bush, so they have the election tied at 269-269…possibly the most chilling outcome possible.

None of this is because potential voters are changing their minds. It's because different polls are being announced in different orders, and the prognosticators are treating teensy fluctuations like they mean something.

This is real silly. The Slate folks even say, "…if you don't like that projection, just wait an hour." Part of me would like to chug-a-lug about six bottles of Nyquil and wake up when all this is over. I'm just afraid six bottles would only get me about three days into the recounts.

The silliness of watching the electoral maps today is driven home by what William Saletan (usually, one of my favorite political commentators) is doing over on Slate. For some reason, he and his staff have taken the position that there's no such thing as a state too close to call; that every state must be awarded to Bush or Kerry, no matter how ambiguous the polls are. So last night, he had Kerry winning with 299 electoral votes. This morning, he moved Ohio and Florida from Kerry to Bush, so Bush is now winning with 286. This may be great for driving traffic to their website but a pretty good argument can be made that it's just exploiting microscopic shifts of polls — some of them, less trustworthy than others — that are all well within the margins of error. In his accompanying notes, he doesn't seem to even think the shifts represent anything significant…but he recolors the map, all the same.

Again, it helps to look back at the 2000 election. A lot of these polls missed predicting the final vote in some states by 3 or 4 points, sometimes more. And today, we're looking at electoral projection maps that award a state to a candidate if he's a tenth of a point ahead in those same polls. Why is it so tough to say that the numbers indicate that either Kerry or Bush could win Ohio or Florida or any of about a half-dozen other states?

Yeah, I know. It's something to do the day before the election. As pundit Jack Germond once said, "We aren't paid to say 'I don't know,' so we have to say something whether we know or not."

My sense is that you can look at this thing two ways. If you take polls as literally as polls ought to be taken — which is to say, as probable not definite gauges — then Bush is a slight favorite. And if you look at the emotion out there and the mobilization of ground forces tomorrow, Kerry has a slight advantage. I think folks on both sides who are fantasizing about landslides are kidding themselves.

Right now, I'm less scared over who will win than I am over how messy it will be with all the charges of vote stealing and vote suppression and machines that misrecord your selections. This past weekend, we turned back the clocks and they said it was the longest night of the year. Just wait 'til tomorrow evening if you want to see a long night.

I'll not insult your intelligence by thinking I can convince you at this late date to vote my way…or that you need me to remind you to go vote at all. I will suggest that if you go vote Tuesday, you prepare yourself for a very long line at the polling place. I think we're about to see a record turnout, to the extent that polls will be ordered to remain open long after the official closing times. The fact that many of them will also be cluttered with observers and cameramen and exit pollsters will further add to the chaos, and make many of us think we were lunkheads for not going the absentee route.

Unless the exit polls indicate some tremendous landslide, I doubt we'll know who won on Tuesday evening. Certainly, there will be whole precincts where the machines go kablooey or the ballots mysteriously don't line up with the candidates or even show all their names, and you'll see people swearing they touched the button for Bush but the machine registered a vote for Michael Dukakis…or something. Whatever, it's going to be messy.

Maybe it's just me, but I sure get the impression that the pollsters — the non-partisan ones, at least — are a lot less sure of their projections this year than usual. An unprecedented number of ballots…more new registered voters than usual…technological changes like cell phones and early voting and so forth…if I were a pollster, I'd sure think this was a good time to not go too far out on a limb. These folks deal in models that are based in part on previous elections, and we've never had an election quite like this one. Perhaps their surveys really are calling it this close to 50-50, but there may also be a little "playing it safe" in there.

For some reason, I was reminded today of the joke about Hubert Humphrey in 1968 when he was running against Nixon. He and his wife actually went to bed before the results were all in and — and this part begins the joke — he turned to her and said, "Well, Muriel. Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you'll get to make love with the president-elect of the United States." The next morning, she woke him up and asked, "How does this work? Do I go to Dick's house or does he come over here?"

Someone wrote me and asked, "If Bush wins another four years, who or what will you think was responsible?" In that event, I'd blame the entire Democratic Party for even fielding a candidate. Because if Bush ran unopposed, he'd lose for sure.

Never mind the election. Let's talk about important stuff. Let's talk about TiVo.

Since Jay, Dave and Conan were all in reruns last week, I seized the opportunity to have my office TiVo upgraded. On Wednesday, I took it in to a company called Weaknees and on Thursday, I went by and they handed it back to me. When it went in, it had a maximum capacity (on the slowest speed) of 80 hours. Now, at Basic Quality, I get 322 hours and 18 minutes.

I found Weaknees by asking about on some TiVo-oriented Internet forums. Their main stock-in-trade is selling kits with which you can upgrade your TiVo at home with very little technical expertise. I could probably have bought one and done the conversion myself but since the Weaknees office happens to be not far from my home — and since I'm busy and they'll do the installation for fifty bucks — I decided to let them handle it. Their website, as you'll see, explains the process in a pretty clear manner…and the site's also chock full of info about TiVos and how they work and what to do when they don't.

The neat thing here, beyond the fact that I can now record every stupid show I could ever want to watch, is that my TiVo is reborn…but it's still the same one with the same lifetime subscription. As you surely know, a TiVo requires a sub to the TiVo service and that will run you (currently) $12.95 per month or $299 for the life of the machine. I bought the latter…but that means that when this TiVo wears out and needs to be replaced, I'll have to buy a new subscription. The TiVo upgrade I had done installs two new hard disks and since that's the part most likely to wear out on the machine, I have an almost-new machine which continues the old sub. So far, I'm very happy.

In other electronics news around my house: My favorite digital camera is my Nikon Coolpix 990 — it's the one I use for all those fabulous raccoon pics — or at least, it was my favorite. Today, I found that a tab on the battery compartment has broken off, making it impossible to close the door…which makes it impossible to use the camera. A quick search of our beloved Internet yields the info that this happens an awful lot on the Coolpix 990 — a design flaw that has been corrected on later models. And of course, it's one of those design flaws that usually doesn't show up until the thing is out of warranty. Lovely. I'm told Nikon will fix it if I ship them the camera and $150 and wait a few months to get it back…and there's no guarantee that little tab won't snap off again. You can imagine how happy I am about this.

Michael Kinsley makes a good point. Right now, this election is about a lot of trivia and it looks like it's going to be very close. But as soon as one guy wins, it's going to be about a mandate for the winner and the rejection of the loser's entire existence.

One other thought on the new Osama tape and one "by the way"…

We've heard a lot of low, contrived attacks during this election but I don't think any are as desperate and as lacking in reality as, "The terrorists want to see [name of candidate] to win." Who the hell knows who they would like to see win the presidency? Or even if they care? One would tend to think that where the rulers of America are viewed as the spawns of Satan, the characterization applies to anyone — Bush or Kerry — who is not prepared to utterly reverse decades of U.S. policy.

For that matter, even if video analysis of the tape showed that Osama was wearing a Bush-Cheney button or a Kerry-Edwards lapel pin, what would that mean? He could be hoping for the election of a given ticket because he thinks that administration is more likely to pull U.S troops out of the lands he holds sacred. Or he could be rooting for those candidates because he thinks they're more likely to do something so egregiously destructive that it will further unite the Arab world against us. He could even come out for the candidate he likes less because he thinks that will drive American voters to the other guy. My guess is he doesn't care who's in the White House any more than we care who Al Qaeda names Employee of the Month.

I mean, if he cared, he could have said something that really sank one guy or the other…like, "I hope you Americans will vote for my old business partner, Dick Cheney — oh, and Dick, thank the Halliburton boys for that new, secret shipment of weapons." Or "I hope you Americans will vote for John Kerry because he has secretly assured me that he will arrange for flying lessons for my men if we'll promise to destroy the Del Monte ketchup factory!"

The issues in this election are pretty clear. It's amazing how many people are trying to drag in ambiguous, arguable points like which candidate the terrorists would prefer.

Here's the by-the way: By the way, the first TV coverage I saw of the Osama tape happened to be a CBS News Special Report anchored by Dan Rather. I suppose all the initial reports said something about how the footage had not been verified so it was possible it was not Bin Laden or was not what it was purported to be. But Rather must have said that twenty times in about ten minutes. Every sentence included a disclaimer that the tape had not been verified, that they were not saying that the man in the tape was definitely Osama, etc. Guess someone at CBS said to someone else, "Dan, for God's sake. We got hung out to dry over some bogus letters…try not to totally humiliate us if this tape turns out to be phony."