The Last Days

If the election is as close as seems likely, the U.S. people may not know for many hours, perhaps days, possibly even weeks after Nov. 7 whether they have elected Tom Dewey or Franklin Roosevelt.

Reason: the soldier vote. Eight states have fixed soldier-vote-counting deadlines after Election Day. In Missouri (15 electoral votes), soldier votes may be received up to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 8, and counting cannot begin until Nov. 10. Rhode Island and North Dakota (four electoral votes each) will receive soldier ballots up until Dec. 5 before counting them. In between are Pennsylvania (35 electoral votes), Colorado (6), California (25), Nebraska (6) and Washington (8). The eight states have a total of 103 electoral votes. Three of them--Pennsylvania, Missouri and Washington--are neck-&-neck races, in which the soldier-vote count may not only be delayed but decisive.

Newsmen, pondering the possibility of a nation tensely waiting the result for perhaps a whole month, almost hoped for a landslide either way. The drama of such a situation would have only two parallels in the last 75 years--the night of Nov. 7, 1916, when Charles Evans Hughes went to bed a President-elect, and awoke to defeat; and the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, which was not settled until the House of Representatives decided in favor of Hayes on March 2, 1877, 115 days after the election.

There seemed little doubt that the election would be close, unless all the polls and the experts were wrong. Pollster Gallup gave Franklin Roosevelt a slight edge (51%) but had left himself plenty of room to get back off the limb. The FORTUNE survey, conducted by Elmo Roper, gave Candidate Roosevelt 53.5%, but it also pointed to the numerous imponderables that make poll-taking risky work in 1944. Some of them: 1) the soldier vote; 2) migrating war workers; 3) the difficulty of poll-taking under gas rationing; 4) the "silent vote." The one new development in the FORTUNE poll was that a partial check, using a secret ballot instead of oral answers, substantially increased Dewey's vote. At week's end pollsters were busily rechecking and their final counts were yet to come. Whether the polls were right or wrong might not be known until Dec. 5.

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