The polls seem to show President Obama with a small but persistent lead in Ohio, lowering the chances that we’ll be waiting a couple of weeks for the result of the election thanks to the state’s scheduled delay in counting provisional ballots.  (They don’t start counting those ballots until Nov. 17.)  It also means the chances of post-election litigation over those wrong-precinct ballots probably won’t matter for the presidential election outcome.  And that’s a very, very good thing.

But Florida is a different story.  Today comes word of two very different polls out of Florida, along with reports of lines stretching as long as 3 or more hours in some parts of the state. It may be very close, even too close to call.

Heaven help us if the election comes down to Florida.  And even if it doesn’t matter for the electoral college, but the margin is razor thin, we could be looking at a situation where controversial changes in election rules passed by the the state’s Republican legislature over the last few years, could make a difference to the outcome of the election.

I’ll be writing about that possibility and a broader look at the philosophical divide between Democrats and Republicans over the nature of voting and how that plays into the voting wars in the cover piece in tomorrow’s Sacramento Bee California Forum.