Popular vote still too close to call

Gore is ahead, but may not emerge the winner

By Brooks Jackson/CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It's Al Gore's biggest talking point. He claims he won the popular vote on Election Day, and supporters echo that.

"Democrats won the popular vote in the race for the White House," Andrew Card, Democratic National Committee chairman told reporters Thursday. Picking up on that theme, Gore Campaign Chairman William Daley argued that the popular vote tally give Gore the moral authority to press a legal challenge in Florida.

"More voted for Al Gore than Gov. Bush," Daley said.

But it's not true -- not yet. There are still millions more votes to be tallied before it's clear who won the popular vote.

"There are 1.1 million outstanding in California, absentees that haven't been counted, (and) 900,000 that haven't been counted in Washington," said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Gans added that another 400,000 remain untallied in New York.

In addition, because Oregon attempted an all-mail voting system, about 300,000 votes remained out Thursday, Gans said.

"And then there are scatterings of votes in other places, including Alaska, whose votes are highly incomplete," he said. "There are more than enough votes to close a 200,000 vote gap."

Gore does lead in the unofficial tally of the popular vote -- but by a narrow and changing margin. On Election Night, he was running behind by half a million votes. By the next day, he led by about 250,000 votes.

By Thursday afternoon his lead over Bush had shrunk to less than 200,000 votes -- out of more than a 100 million counted for all candidates.

But those are just unofficial totals, gathered by the news media, subject to change due to recounts or late-tallied absentees. In 1996, the unofficial totals being reported the morning after Election Day showed a total of nearly 93 million votes cast for president. But weeks later, the official ally showed well over 96 million votes were actually cast.

President Clinton's winning margin changed significantly when all the votes were counted. Morning-after totals had him beating Bob Dole by just over 7 million votes, but his official winning margin turned out to be 8 million -- a change of more than 440,000 votes.

This time around, a change could go either way.

"Absentee voters,in general, tend to be more upscale and therefore likely to be more Republican," says Gans. "On the other hand, the bulk of the absentees is in the West Coast and particularly in California, and that tends to be a little more liberal. So we don't know."

And we won't know -- not for a while. This one is still too close to call.