Cross-posted here. This topic area has been touched upon at Daily Kos, both on the front-page and in some recent diaries, but I wanted to develop on it further.
For all of Politico's faults, they do produce some good stuff from time to time. This evening they published a really well-written and well-researched trend story on nail-biter election returns and the prevalence of court challenges. The apparent trend is even the foundation of the 2008 movie, "Swing Vote" that I saw last summer, where the whole presidential election comes down to one guy, who gets a do-over when the machine cancels his vote. The probability of that occurring is infinitesimal, but the likelihood of extremely close elections, according to the Politico story, is higher than ever before.