OU CAN GET cheated in politics, as in life. No system is foolproof or perfect or absolutely fair. Life is a sloppy, slippery, disorganized business; politics even more so. So regardless of the fact that Al Gore got more votes nationwide Tuesday night than the other guy, rules are rules. It may be an anachronism, but the Electoral College rules are how we play the game.
If it were the other way around, with Gore prevailing in the electoral vote, I'd be making the same argument. Did George W. Bush actually get more votes out of Florida than Gore? We'll never know. The Palm Beach County ballot fiasco points up how Gore lost some votes when confused voters punched their ballot for Pat Buchanan by mistake, a claim even Buchanan admits.
Did local election officials, either through mistake or evil intent, void or lose or destroy other ballots for Gore, possibly to help the GOP or to tilt a local race? We'll never know.
If they had a rerun election in Florida, where more people got to vote, or did it by mail or Internet to maximize turnout, would Gore win? Probably, because the less-well-off who'd vote Democratic vote in smaller percentages. But we'll never know.
What do I think will happen? I think Bush will probably eventually be declared the winner in Florida when the absentee ballots are tallied Nov. 17. There's no practical way to rerun the election, either for Florida as a whole or for the Palm Beach County voters either, without massive expense, confusion, vote-rigging, intimidation, and even violent criminal acts.
Given the stakes - the right to run the government for four years - we can't rerun anything in Florida. America's enemies lie in wait. We're vulnerable and dead in the water. Our allies and enemies are watching.
My guess is that Gore will do the right thing for the country and concede graciously next Friday, deciding not to put the country through the wringer. In what may have been the tortured Richard Nixon's most magnaminous act, Nixon backed away gracefully in 1960 when JFK was deemed winner by less than one vote per precinct. That was the last time we elected a president who was not from the Sun Belt.
The ''Boss'' mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, is believed to have held back releasing the Cook County vote till he judged he had enough to top the down-state Illinois Republicans who had a reputation for fudging their counts. Ditto in Texas. Tuesday night one of Daley's son's, Bill, was orchestrating the Gore campaign's response to this hellaciously unsatisfactory outcome. What we don't need from either side is the postelection beefing that rubs wounds raw and stirs anew the partisan passions that subside after elections.
Yesterday Missouri Senator Christopher ''Kit'' Bond claimed there'd been ''a major criminal enterprise'' by Democrats in his state to keep polls open late in Democratic precincts of St. Louis, costing Senator John Ashcroft his seat.
The irony of ironies is that the Republican establishment spent a whole year denigrating Gore, assaulting his character, demeaning him as a liar, heaping every sort of vitriol and ridicule on the vice president, yet now they call upon him to make the supreme political sacrifice. The party of impeachment demands that Gore fall on his sword and quit to spare the country the looming ordeal. My guess is Gore will do the right thing.
The man assailed for his character will prove his enemies wrong. He may have lost Florida's electoral votes and the presidency to a rigged system, to corrupt local officials, to deliberate ballot chicanery, to a vicious last-minute assault by retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, who shed his patriot's garb for the greasy togs of political hatchetman. My hunch is that Gore will be a better man than those who traduced him all year.
''Tell Gore and Billy Daley not to give in,'' people implore me. Sorry. The nation's stability is more important than whichever side falls upon the spoils of office. I voted for Gore and hold a dim view of Bush Jr., a smug slacker with an irritating air of entitlement and bereft of intellectual curiosity. But we'll survive him. The country should not be put through the wringer. The system is more important than either man or either party.
The last time Florida was the linchpin of an Electoral College crisis was after the 1876 election when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes finished 250,000 votes behind Democrat Samuel Tilden in the national popular vote total. The Republicans stacked an election review panel that threw out thousands of Democratic votes in Florida and three other states.
But it was a devil's bargain. The Republicans agreed to Democratic demands that federal troops be pulled out of Southern states and stop enforcing the civil rights of Negroes as part of the Civil War's outcome. Hayes got the White House, by the margin of one electoral vote. The freed slaves were shoved back into oppression. Writes historian Samuel Eliot Morison: ''There is no longer any doubt that this election was stolen.''
We need leaders of both parties to step up to a higher level of statesmanship than has prevailed in the last eight bitter years. A new and weakened president needs propping up from both sides. Deals can be made. But if one side or the other falls upon the carcass of this indecisive election like a pack of ravenous hyenas, that party will deserve all of our scorn and a full measure of revenge at the next election.
David Nyhan's e-mail address is nyhan@globe.com.
