Democracy in Peril

By Steve Sebelius

What's going to happen on Election Day? Here's your official Democracy in Peril schedule.

• 7 a.m. Polls open throughout Las Vegas.

• 7:02 a.m. Democrats file the first lawsuit of Election Day in Clark County District Court, alleging the electronic voting screens are too bright and thus violate the voting rights of the light-impaired community.

• 7:14 a.m. Republicans, late to the polls because of a line at Starbucks, make the first challenge of voter residency. By the time polls close at 7 p.m., they will have made 11,267,987 such challenges, all but two against ethnic minorities. (And those two were well-tanned.)

• 7:19 a.m. ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN call the election for Sen. John Kerry, based on entrance poll results along the Eastern Seaboard. Fox News already called the election for President Bush on Halloween. CBS' Dan Rather waits, having received a memo from network bosses telling him to wait until polls close in California to announce winners. Later, it will be proved the memo was fake.

• 8:04 a.m. A Florida retiree damages an electronic voting machine in Sun City Anthem by poking the screen with a sharp object. Later, he will say he was trying to avoid hanging chads, like last time. He will be directed to a new machine, where he will accidentally write in "Pat Buchanan."

• 9:35 a.m. Several Democratic voters skip work in order to vote, only to discover the registration forms they filed at that "REPUBLICANS REGISTER HERE; DEMOCRATS GO FUCK YOURSELVES" booth were not properly filed with the county. They will demand to vote provisionally. Election workers will agree, then discard the ballots.

• 10:58 a.m. A Review-Journal exit poll finds Bush with 102 percent of the vote, Kerry with negative-15 percent, and Ralph Nader with 2 percent. The results are posted on the web.

• 11:14 a.m. The Las Vegas Sun conducts an exit poll of its own, which finds Kerry with 1,408 percent, Bush with negative-4 kajillion and Libertarian Michael Badnarik with 4 percent. The results, along with a story quoting several UNLV political science professors saying the R-J poll is wrong, is posted on the web.

• 1:27 p.m. Democrats file their 1,211th lawsuit of the day, alleging Republicans are systematically trying to exclude black, Hispanic, Asian, homeless, hippie and gay voters. Republicans reply that Democrats are simply following their playbook, which contains a passage encouraging lawsuits based on the exclusion of black, Hispanic, Asian, homeless, hippie and gay voters.

• 4:45 p.m. Bush makes his 221st and final trip to Nevada to campaign.

• 6:12 p.m. Kerry, making his 567th trip to Nevada to campaign, offers to drive several voters to the polls himself in a converted Chevy cargo van stocked with doughnuts and prescription drugs imported from Canada.

• 6:52 p.m. Many undecided voters turn to the huge stack of political mail that's been littering the coffee table and earnestly begin studying the candidates' records.

• 6:59 p.m. Frodo Baggins tosses the Dark Lord Sauron's ring into the fires of Mount Doom.

• 7 p.m. Bush loses.