Will It End on Tuesday?

We searched news stories, commentaries, the Web and TV to see what doomsayers and pollyannas were expecting on election day.

Charles Krauthammer,

syndicated columnist

“[T]here are 10,000 lawyers ready, readied by the Democrats, to descend upon the electoral process. You turn 10,000 lawyers loose on a medium-size country and you end up with rubble.... You can have one disputed election a century. But two in a row, and in a wartime, would be a catastrophe for the country.”

Jeffrey Toobin,

CNN legal analyst

“The odds are pretty strong that we will be in court well before noon on Tuesday. There will be lawsuits filed during the day, well before even the polls close.”

Joe Lockhart,

senior advisor to Sen. John Kerry

“I don’t think this is going to be a litigation election.”

Ivo Daalder,

coauthor of “American Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy”

“How can we run a foreign policy ... arguing that we are the shining example of what it means to be a democratic government when on the most basic element of democracy, the casting and counting of votes, we get it wrong twice in a row?”

Warren Christopher,

former secretary of State who monitored Florida recount on behalf of Al Gore in 2000 election

“A repeat performance [of 2000] would do irreparable damage to the goodwill and forbearance so essential to a functioning democracy.”

Leon E. Panetta,

chief of staff under President Clinton and director of the Panetta Institute

“[I] don’t know how many national elections you can take to the Supreme Court and not at some point have an explosion in this country.”

Bob Woodward,

author, most recently of “Plan of Attack”

“Maybe, if there is another mess, people will look at [the electoral system] and say, we need some uniform system.... I’ve heard stories, not just from Florida but lots of states. So God knows what we might be running into election night, particularly if it’s close.”

David Boies,

Gore’s campaign attorney in the 2000 Florida recount

“You’ve got many of the same ingredients that you had in 2000.... You have it probably coming down to Florida again.”

John Fund,

author of “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy”

“There’s a 25% chance we go into overtime. There’s a 75% chance we’ll know who the winner is.”

Marc Racicot

President Bush’s campaign chairman

“We presume this election will unfold as it should....[W]e know that secretaries of state across this country and legislatures and Congress have worked very hard to make certain that this election unfolds as it should.”

--Compiled by Stephen W. Stromberg