Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge Tuesday to allow it to join a legal fight there over whether election officials in one county may sit out the state's impending recount.

The closest governor's race in Washington state history lurched forward Friday, as state Democrats announced they had raised enough money to start a third count, this one by hand, of nearly 3 million ballots.

A trickle of voters across southern Louisiana turned out Saturday to vote in runoffs for two bitterly contested House races.

When Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell certifies the state's final presidential election results, declaring President Bush the winner by about 119,000 votes, critics say they intend to present two challenges.

The leader of the Democratic National Committee announced Monday that he will launch an investigation into voting irregularities in Ohio, where lines snaked outside some inner-city polling places on Election Day and provisional ballots were sometimes in short supply.

A recount by hand of 2.9 million votes began Wednesday to determine the winner of the closest gubernatorial race in state history.

The Ohio delegation to the electoral college cast its votes for President Bush on Monday, hours after dissident groups asked the state Supreme Court to review the outcome of the state's presidential race.

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously rejected the request that previously rejected absentee and provisional ballots be included in the hand recount of Washington state's contested governor's race.

Revisiting the contested state reveals a broader picture of how balloting was conducted for the presidential election.

The state Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that at least 573 previously disqualified absentee ballots -- potentially enough to swing the state's tightest election ever for Christine Gregoire -- can be counted.

Seven weeks after voters went to the polls, Democrat Christine Gregoire won Washington state's astonishingly close governor's contest by 130 votes, according to results of the third and final count.

With the increasing maturation of the Internet as a political tool -- and the huge sums that can be raised online -- experts said those addresses can remain valuable long after an election.

Election officials finished the presidential recount in Ohio on Tuesday, with the final tally shaving about 300 votes off President Bush's six-figure margin of victory in the state that gave him a second term.

The Republicans, true to their vow to leave no vote unwooed, came to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania hoping to win over the famously reclusive Old Order Amish, along with their slightly less-strict brethren, the Mennonites. Democrats laughed at the very idea. But the GOP effort did the trick.

In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion, an analysis shows.

Invoking rules that sometimes seem quaint as quill pens, the House and Senate certified President Bush's reelection despite a rare objection, which was intended to spotlight voting irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere.

The state's chief elections officer, accused of mishandling the presidential vote in November, sent a fundraising letter for his 2006 gubernatorial campaign that was accompanied by a request for illegal contributions.

The freshly inaugurated Democratic governor's grip on the job she won by the tissue-thin margin of 129 votes remains wobbly, as Republicans press state courts to order a new election.

Sen. John F. Kerry, in some of his most pointed public comments yet about the presidential election, invoked Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy on Monday as he criticized President Bush and decried reports of voter disenfranchisement.

Interviewing for the 2004 exit polls was the most inaccurate of any in the past five presidential elections as procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John F. Kerry, according to a report released Wednesday by the research firms responsible for the flawed surveys.

Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee has been studying the electorate, and the party's problem with voters of faith is both worse and better than he feared.

Five months after President Bush launched his drive to overhaul Social Security, the difficult, if not impossible, task of drafting legislation begins Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee holds the first hearing on options to secure Social Security's future.

House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists. The House Majority Leader has said that his expenses on a 2000 trip were paid by a nonprofit organization, and that the financial arrangements for it were proper.

An exercise demonstrated that middle-age, out-of-shape women who wore pedometers and were instructed to take at least 10,000 steps daily walked more than those who were told to take a 30-minute walk.