Take fraud out of the picture, and the election wasn't close. All polls showed a landslide a week prior to election and the only thing those polls can't really measure is fraud. The governor of Pa. told the Bush camp Pa was in the bag and those party internal polls are supposed to be the very best; again they don't measure fraud. W was up by 60K votes in Fla with a half hour to go when Algor called to concede and some turkey clearly manufactured 60,000 votes and spread them around in the last fifteen minutes; he merely missed his tally by a couple thousand.
If we don't get some sort of a handle on voting fraud, republicans will never win another election in America. My own favored solution is to do away with the idea of the secret ballot. It's no longer needed and without it, fraud would be impossible. The secret ballot was needed in 1920 when people lived in company towns and would get fired for voting the wrong way, or lived in Peyton place and didn't want neighbors knowing who they were sleeping with AND who they were voting for. Neither situation exists in today's America.