After the U.S. map was fully colored in, polarized between the blue coasts and fringes on the one hand and the vast expanse of red in the middle on the other, after John Kerry gave his concession speech and blue voters started planning mourning parties, it didn't take longfor bloggers and pundits to examine tally sheets and find some alarming details. Unlike the 2000 elections, though, it took more than a week for 2004's voting glitches and irregularities to really register on the mainstream media radar. By that time legions of Internet-basedwriters and theorists were already screaming "voter fraud" and calling for Kerry's "unconcession."

By those standards, the 2000 presidential election was over for about an hour early Wednesday morning — the interval between when Democratic nominee Al Gore called Republican George W. Bush to concede and when he hit redial and called in his unconcession.

The discombobulation of Mr. Dole's campaign was epitomized when the campaign prematurely sent to newsrooms a fax conceding that he had lost. After a flurry of telephone calls, he became the first Presidential candidate in history to unconcede, however temporarily.