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| Thursday, 4 November 2004 |
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Bush, Kerry in see-saw battle, key states still too close to call: US TV WASHINGTON, Wednesday (AFP) George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry were locked in a see-saw battle for the US presidency, according to early projections and returns from Tuesday's election but all key swing states remained in play with results too close to call. With polling stations closed in 40 states and the District of Columbia, Bush was projected to win 16 states and 156 electoral votes while Kerry was set to win 10 states and the federal capital with their 112 electoral votes, US television networks said. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win and, according to exit polling data and early returns, the 68 electoral votes in the crucial battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania were still up for grabs, they said. Bush won Ohio and Florida in the 2000 election and well after polls closed there, the networks said both states remained in play. Pennsylvania, which Bush's 2000 challenger Al Gore took, was also impossible to call, they said. Bush won Florida and the presidency by only 537 votes in 2000, after the US Supreme Court halted five weeks of recounts there. The narrow margins revealed by Tuesday's preliminary returns and exit polls suggested another extremely close race amid heavy voter turnout. Bush pulled out victories in several states that he had been widely expected to win but had been too close to call until several hours after their polls closed. After hesitating initially, all the major US networks projected that Bush, as he did in 2000, would take North and South Carolina and Virginia with their 31 electoral votes. In addition to those three states, Bush was set to win Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming, according to the networks. The projections showed that Kerry would take the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. In the popular vote, Bush was leading with 10.7 million votes, or 53 percent, to Kerry's 9.3 million votes, or 46 percent, with 13 percent of the country's precincts reporting returns, according to CNN. |
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