WASHINGTON — It could end with a whimper or a wallop.
The end-game scenarios for America's to-be-determined presidential race range from a candidate's quiet surrender to an escalating partisan battle that culminates with an explosive showdown in Congress or the Supreme Court.
The zigzag course of events since Election Day gives pause to even the most intrepid of prognosticators. Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush are drawing up multiple-choice road maps from here to the Oval Office.
Saturday's developments
The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature will hold a special session Wednesday to consider naming the state's 25 electors as a precaution in case a court overturns Bush's certified victory.
A state judge in Tallahassee, Fla., heard testimony on whether canvassers should recount 14,000 ballots from Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
Supreme Court justices went behind closed doors to review a Florida ruling that helped Gore cut into Bush's lead.
Bush met with GOP leaders and discussed the economy and next year's agenda. "I'm soon to be the president," he said.
Gore had lunch with actor Tommy Lee Jones, his college roommate.
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Columnist Lee Benson looks at "the election that will never end"
"There's an untold number of possibilities," said Robert M. Hardaway, a constitutional law professor at the University of Denver College of Law. "Each scenario has its own 10 sub-alternatives that branch out into almost an infinite number of alternatives."
Although plenty of unforeseen twists and turns are to be expected, here are some possible routes to a new president:
BUSH'S LEAD STANDS: This may be the least complicated of all the scenarios. Under this end game, Gore at some point decides he cannot come up with the additional ballots to erase Bush's 537-vote lead in Florida. That decision could come if Gore loses his multiple legal efforts to add more ballots to the Florida vote, a battle that he could choose to end at any time or take all the way to the Supreme Court. A concession also could come if additional vote-counts fail to give Gore an edge. "As long as he gets his shot at the count in Florida, he's indicated he'd live with the results," said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Florida's 25 electoral votes go to Bush without further challenge.
GORE COMES UP WITH MORE VOTES: Through one or more Gore legal victories, the vote totals under which Bush was certified as the winner in Florida are reopened. The big hurdle for Gore is the clock. Florida's electors are to be selected on Dec. 12 and cast their Electoral College ballots on Dec. 18. "We need to get the count of the ballots started," says Gore attorney David Boies. "The longer we go on, the more days, indeed, the more hours that slip by, the more difficult it becomes." If Gore noses ahead in the vote count, then it would be Bush's call whether to concede or throw up legal challenges to a slate of Gore electors.
LEGISLATURE INTERVENES. Now things can really get murky. Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature is ready to call a special session Wednesday to determine the state's 25 electors — presumably pledged to Bush. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor; he is encouraging the Legislature.
If the Legislature selects a Bush slate, Gore could fight on in the courts, resulting in rival slates of Florida electors being sent to Congress. The U.S. House and Senate would have to decide which slate to recognize. To reject a slate, both houses must agree. And since Republicans will control the House and Gore will have the tie-breaking vote in a 50-50 Senate, there could be an impasse in which neither slate was rejected. The question could end up being thrown to the Supreme Court. "Ah, what a three-dimensional Rubik's Cube we have," says Bush attorney Ben Ginsberg.
NO ELECTORAL MAJORITY: Now it is time for Bush and Gore to call in more battalions of constitutional scholars. Legal experts disagree on what the Constitution means when it says the next president will be the person who wins "a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed."
Some say a candidate must claim a majority of the full 538 electoral votes. If that view prevails, neither candidate could win without Florida's 25 electors. And without them, it would be up to the House to select the next president and the Senate to pick the vice president. (One plausible result: President Bush and Vice President Joseph Lieberman.)
Other experts say that disputed electors could be left out of the Electoral College total, reducing the size of the majority needed to win. If that view prevails, Gore has a majority of the electoral votes excluding Florida's.
"The whole things turns on what is an appointed elector," said Walter Berns, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. It looks like another question that could be posed to the Supreme Court.
WILD CARDS: The possibilities are limitless: everything from the chance that outside lawsuits invalidate whole swaths of Florida votes to the notion that members of the Electoral College switch their votes. For example, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel has said that Republican electors around the nation should consider abstaining or switch their votes since Gore won the popular vote. If Bush gets Florida's 25 electors, he would have 271 electoral votes — just one more than the 270 needed to win. So if two Bush electors switched to Gore, the two candidates would be tied, an idea that already has provoked an uproar among Republicans.
"Anybody who tries to persuade electors to do this ought to accompany that with a promise of the witness protection program," jokes Berns.