BBC News Online's Kevin Anderson is keeping a weblog as the US prepares to go to the polls on 2 November.
He'll be recording his thoughts and observations - both serious and not so serious - as well as finding answers to your questions.
Why not bookmark this page and come back to it for the latest updates?
29 October
WASHINGTON, DC :: 1748 GMT
Just a quick follow up on the question of "Faithless Electors" in the Electoral College from a couple of days ago.
Mark in Paignton also wanted to know how the electors are chosen.
This is yet another one of those things left up to the states, so, like so many things connected with the elections, it varies.
The state political parties generally choose the electors at their state political convention, a much smaller, much less glitzy version of the national political conventions held this summer.
In other states, electors are chosen in the primary elections. You not only vote for a presidential candidate but also for a candidate's electors.
Nick in Manchester wanted to know "if the number of electoral college votes has always been the same since the beginning of elections?"
No. First off, the number of states has increased over the history of the United States, from the original 13 colonies to the now 50 states.
With the exception of Washington DC (District of Columbia), the number of electors in each state is equal to the number of Representatives and Senators in the US Congress from each state.
All states have two senators.
Washington is not a state but a federal district and has no senators and only one non-voting member of the House of Representatives. That's an entirely separate post, if I have time before the elections.
There are 435 Representatives in the House. Representation in the House is based on population.
As you point out, population shifts, and yes the allocation of representatives and therefore electors has changed since 2000.
To put a finer point on it, if George W Bush wins exactly the same states next Tuesday that he won four years ago, he would actually win with 278 electoral votes instead of the 271 he won with in 2000.
I've included a link to a FAQ at the US National Archives for any other questions.
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WASHINGTON, DC :: 1438 GMT
OK, it's one of those Sisyphean tasks, keeping up with the internet chatter about the election.
Yeah, as many of you noted, I took a pass on whether President Bush was wearing a wire because, even if he was getting answers piped to him directly through some type of super-secret mind-meld with Karl Rove, I didn't see it doing him much good in that first debate.
The truth and the winning candidate are out there somewhere
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People were e-mailing me for weeks. Curious as to why people were so exercised about that.
But you were.
And some of the stuff flying around the net is pure X-Files. The show has made us a nation of conspiracy theorists.
But it does break the monotony of hearing the same Kerry and Bush stump speech yet one more time.
Here goes a quick round-up of world wide whispers that actually made it from the internet onto the nightly news.
Yes, just as they did with the false National Guard documents used to dupe Dan Rather, bloggers have pointed out that the Bush campaign altered a picture in the latest ad.
Oddly, the campaign cut Mr Bush out of a picture of an appearance at Fort Drum in front of row after row of troops and copied in groups of soldiers to replace him.
I would have thought they would have cut-and-pasted Our Dear Leader doing something heroic like securing a key bridge over the Euphrates single-handedly with nothing but his trusty sidearm.
Steady conservatives, I enjoy having fun at the expense of politicians full stop, not just conservative politicians.
Just pointing out that historically photo manipulation is a favourite pastime of Stalinists. But now Photoshop makes it fun and easy for everyone.
Not that I think it comes even close to rising to that level. I think in the grand scheme of political sleight of hand, this ranks pretty low.
But both campaigns are looking for any advantage right now, and the Kerry campaign pounced.
"The Bush campaign's advertising has been consistently dishonest in what they say. But today, it's been exposed for being dishonest about what we see," Joe Lockhart of the Kerry campaign said in a statement.
There's a new photo now on the website. Take a quick dip into the blogosphere and you'll see the original.
And yes, a video link has been making the rounds of a younger George W Bush back in Texas flipping "a one-fingered victory salute" to someone off camera before a television interview.
Yes, this was all over the US news last night.
What does this mean? Keeps the "Anybody But Bush" voters revved up and itching to go to the polls next week.
WASHINGTON, DC :: 0418 GMT
Getting my daily dose of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, and now, I don't have to stay up next Tuesday to wait for the results.
The game is over, according to John Zogby.
The president of the polling organisation that bears his name has predicted that John Kerry will win the election.
As I've said like a broken record in the blog, this election is a referendum on the incumbent: President Bush.
"If the election was between Bush and not-Bush, not-Bush would win," Mr Zogby said. "The president seems to be locked at 47%."
Pundits have been predicting a last-minute break for the undecided voters. Some will actually enter the voting booth and decide.
And "I think that in the final analysis, the undecideds will break against the president," he said with an amazing degree of confidence, even despite acknowledging that the race remains extremely tight.
Jon Stewart poked fun at the undecideds. He couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't have decided by now.
But Mr Zogby said the undecided voters were actually very articulate.
They don't like the war. They don't like why the US got into the war, but the question is whether they are comfortable with Kerry, he said.
But just because the election will be decided in a little over four days - give or take a few weeks to allow for legal wrangling - he thought the next president will have to deal with the challenge of a deeply divided nation.
"We are two warring nations this year," Mr Zogby said.
The intensity level is high, and no matter the outcome, he said, "Large numbers on either side will not accept the legitimacy of the other."
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28 October
WASHINGTON, DC :: 2124 GMT
Ah, yes, Harriet in London brings up the Great Firewall around GeorgeWBush.com.
Hackers be gone! World not welcome at GeorgeWBush.com
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I've held off on answering on this because I wanted to find out a little more for myself.
On Monday night, I took a call from a colleague at the World Service asking me if I had seen the Bush campaign website.
No, it was one of the few minutes when I wasn't in front of my computer.
He said it had been hacked and replaced with quite an elaborate spoof site. Actually, the site appeared to be redirecting traffic to GeorgeWBush.org.
I went home to check the site. Looked normal to me. Now, my colleague couldn't see the site at all.
So when I started hearing reports that all access had been blocked outside of the US, I was a little suspicious about the reason why.
Was it just down, was it hacked or was it actually blocking international visitors?
Net monitoring company Netcraft thought the Bush site was using a service that filtered visitors based on geography.
Possible. Content distribution service Akamai, which the Bush campaign site started using recently, can filter visitors based on geography.
Yup. Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign has confirmed: "The measure was taken for security reasons." He wouldn't elaborate.
We do know that the site suffered from a Distributed Denial of Service Attack in early October, and obviously, someone was having a play with the site Monday night.
So, Harriet, is it necessarily "a clear signal that Mr Bush has no interest in engaging with the rest of the world"? Well, probably due to mutual contempt.
The Bushies didn't want every hacker from Amsterdam to Zagreb taking a shot at their site, especially seeing as websites are actually integral to modern campaigns.
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ALTERNATIVE ADDRESSES
https://georgewbush.com/
http://65.172.163.222/
http://origin.georgewbush.com/
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And obviously there were more than a few "hacktivists" who wanted nothing more than to enjoy the irony of GeorgeWBush.com broadcasting some anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist message.
But, just in case you want to read George W Bush's detailed agenda, we here at BBCNews.com have found a number of alternate ways to let you read GeorgeWBush.com to your heart's content.
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WASHINGTON, DC :: 1827 GMT
Well, just when the waters were appearing impossibly muddy over these missing weapons, some clarification arrives in my inbox this morning courtesy of Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
To put this in context, Mr Cordesman has been critical of Bush military policy, but he has served in military and intelligence positions in the government since the 1970s.
He sees "something truly absurd about focusing on 277 tonnes of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what happened at Al Qaqaa."
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MISSING EXPLOSIVES
195 metric tons of HMX
141 metric tons of RDX
5.8 metric tons of PETN
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Democratic Senator Joe Biden says Iraq probably had in excess of 650,000 tonnes of explosives before the war, meaning that the stockpiles at Al Qaqaa represent 0.04% of the total.
It was one of 900 sites known before the war, and the US military has found some 10,000 actual weapons caches.
However, Mr Cordesman says if one accepts Pentagon estimates that it has destroyed or secured some 402,000 tonnes of munitions out of at least 650,000 tonnes, that still leaves 148,000 tonnes unaccounted for.
"The real issue, therefore, is whether the US should have planned to secure all of the munitions in some 900 sites during its advance or immediately afterwards, as well as all of the 10,000 weapon caches it could find," he says.
The answer would seem to be yes and would argue for more troop levels and much better "Phase IV" stabilisation planning.
More troops not necessarily the answer
But, the US military had other priorities.
Yes, I know critics of the Bush administration will say that they were more concerned about securing the oil fields.
But the military also had to deal with widespread looting, securing government offices and advancing into the Sunni triangle as well as trying to secure munitions.
If troops in battle were diverted for "rear area missions", it is not clear the US would have been able to achieve its rapid advance to Baghdad, and no one knew that Baghdad would fall so easily.
The Bush war plan did call for a much larger ground force, but it was contingent on deployment through Turkey.
The administration might be accused of misreading Turkish politics, but it did have a plan for more troops on the ground.
It is not clear that a different war plan or more troops would have made a difference in securing sites like Al Qaqaa, Mr Cordesman says.
'The real issues'
After sorting through that, Mr Cordesman goes on to lay out what he sees as the real issues.
Al Qaqaa and the missing weapons are a "tempest in a teapot compared to the broader debate that should have taken place", he says.
He then goes onto a highly critical analysis of America's neo-conservatives' grand strategy for transforming Iraq and the Middle East.
I'm not going to tick off his criticisms. They are well known.
But one criticism he levels at the Bush neo-conservatives that I have heard from both Republican and Democratic foreign policy experts is that the Bush administration suffers from an over-reliance on military force to the exclusion of other instruments of power in fighting the war on terror.
"(The neo-conservatives) saw military action by the Department Defence as a workable substitute for effective coordination and action by all agencies of government," he writes.
The administration had no grand strategy beyond Saddam's fall, and he said that any realism in US strategy has been forced upon the neo-conservatives by career professionals in the military, the State Department and the intelligence community.
This is a really quick and dirty summation of a detailed four-page e-mail briefing, but it raises a lot of issues.
"It would have been nice to have a meaningful debate about these issues, but this is an election year. Like energy, budget deficits, and most serious issues, politics just isn't serious until the campaign is over," he says in conclusion.
Sad but true.
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WASHINGTON, DC :: 1515 GMT
Red Sox win! Red Sox win! That's the headline this morning, pushing all the election news aside for a brief moment.
But moving quickly from baseball to the blood sport of politics, you can feel things accelerating towards Election Day.
Red Sox win! At least some things we know for sure
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Florida is constantly finding new ways to create electoral havoc with some 58,000 absentee ballots going missing in Broward County.
They were supposedly sent to the post office. Where they went from there, no one seems to know. Broward County is heavily Democratic.
John Kerry continues to hammer the president on the missing explosives, and Mr Bush finally addressed the issue in a speech Wednesday.
"Wild charges," Mr Bush says.
And now a conservative newspaper here, the Washington Times, has quoted a Pentagon official at lengthy saying that "almost certainly" Russian troops removed the weapons from Iraq and spirited them away to Syria.
CNN political analyst Bill Schneider says, "There are a lot of muddy details, and it is too late for the voters to sort this out."
Seems like this one is probably moving from a strong line for John Kerry to one of the faith-based talking points.
Kerry and Bush supporters do live in completely different realities.
If you're a Kerry true believer, then you know that the Bush administration messed up, let these weapons go missing and have shown again their incompetence in Iraq.
If you're a Bush true believer, then John Kerry is simply doing and saying anything to get elected.
If you're fed up with them both, it's just more of the same shouting match.
Zero sum gain.
But one thing we do know: Red Sox win! Red Sox Win!
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WASHINGTON, DC :: 0322 GMT
Not all of the prying hordes of journalists can fit onto Air Force One so we rely on a small group of journalists that travel with the president, aka the Press Pool.
These pool reports can be quite tongue-in-cheek affairs, and building on the Halloween theme begun yesterday, I will excerpt a pool report from yesterday.
Always the joker: Rove makes a W sign behind Condoleezza Rice
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The trip from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Vienna, Ohio on Air Force One was mostly uneventful, according to pool reporter James Meek of the New York Daily News.
"However, Halloween came early for your pool shortly after the 1217 pm departure from the odorous Lancaster field (see previous pool report concerning bovine discharges)," Mr Meek reports.
To lighten the mood of the media, Karl "Bush's Brain" Rove paid a visit to the press cabin.
Dressed as "Doctor Rove", the spin-meister-in-chief appeared, prepped for surgery with a cloth mask over his face and his hands up "as if ready for meatball surgery".
"'Dr Rove is here!' he proclaimed giddily, while refusing to be baited about flu vaccine," Mr Meek reported.
"Rove proceeded to massage the scalp of a correspondent with, alas, fewer strands of hair than his 'surgeon,' who promised, oddly, to 'make the circumcision,' and then added that he had 'replaced the defective mental unit'."
Dr Rove pronounced the operation a success.
ps. Christy in New York City asked if I was joking about Dr Rove. Nope. The joke was all his. Happy Halloween!
It seems to me that the folks that want the non-Americans to "keep out of this election" by stating their opinions are the same folks that are supporting Bush. Their words are ignorant. This election DOES concern the whole world. I encourage different opinions. You can't keep the blinders on and believe that you're seeing everything. They just are narrow-minded people who will follow a lemming of a cliff.
Anita, Foxboro, MA
New England Patriots Superbowl Champs 2004. Boston Red Sox World Series Champs 2004. Next is John F Kerry US presidential champion 2004 with honour. My Senator from Massachusetts will be US President.
Alan Colosi, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
This election is going to be won by the candidate that stands for his beliefs. If you don't stand for something you stand for nothing. The current Democrat platform has no values in it. I believe the world is a better place because America has stood for values. As one of the leaders in this free world, we have tremendous responsibility and we don't take it lightly. This election may alter the course of the world. Hopefully our friends around the world will judge us by our deeds, past and present, and not the hot issues of the day.
Mark Blackburn, Pennsburg, PA, USA
Reading your blog and thinking back to conversations when I've been in the US over the last couple of years reminds me of the very different use of the word 'liberal' on different sides of the Atlantic. For example, it seems to make perfect sense to me that a liberal might be anti-gun control. Can you offer us a definitive American definition - and explain why it's so much of a political insult in the US?
Chris, London, UK
The US media is partisan. The BBC and other world news agencies are more objective. Who do you think is in the lead? Where would I find a BBC report on who is ahead in electoral votes?
Scott, San Jose, USA
Kevin, I wonder what you think about the Bush team's decision in recent days to restrict access to Mr Bush's website (www.georgewbush.com), so that only people based in the US can view it? Leaving aside the fact that it's rather short-sighted to deny thousands of American voters based outside the US (including all the servicemen and women current stationed in Iraq) access to his views, it also seems to me to send out a clear signal that Mr Bush has no interest in engaging with the rest of the world.
Harriet, London, UK
I am now quite certain that Kerry will win this election. As close as it is, the future of America will be determined by a few incorrigibly undecided voters. On November 2nd, they will either decide not to vote or vote for the candidate who has always sided with the undecided - Mr John Kerry.
David Rukstales, Phoenix, AZ, USA
I will try and predict the outcome of the US-election based on my review of leadership research. The prediction is pretty complex: Height, age, and better communication skills all give the edge to Kerry, but the threat of the war on terror gives a big boost to Bush. I wonder if there is much room in the US media for a more scientific approach like this. If not, why not?
Mark Van Vugt, Canterbury, UK
As a resident alien I cannot vote in the election. However, I talked and protested and commented and listened whenever I could because the outcome of this election is impacting the entire world. John Kerry was not my favourite choice either but rather Dean or Kucinich. But Kerry is a serious, professional politician with brain and thought. All those who consider "changing a position" a "bad" thing should perhaps think again. Do you put your hand into hot water again after finding out that it burns you? This is what George Bush is doing while hoping for the best.
Margareta Siegel, New York, NY
I too would have preferred Kucinich to Kerry but our country is not yet ready for his ideas. They are seen as radical to most Americans. But it is interesting to note that the internet chatter of the "Green" party, who helped in the election of W by voting for Nader, are now saying not to waste their votes for fear of four more years. Most of them feel that they will be able to at least lobby the Democratic party and have a voice rather than what they are getting now which is a very deaf ear.
Marsha Duncan, Houston Lake, USA
What I would like to know from those non-US readers of this blog is why they think Kerry would be a better leader or why they seem to be convinced that changing the man in office will change the policy. Speaking as an independent, I can honestly say that he won't be and the policy won't change either. Kerry seems to go along with the political theme of the moment - whatever is to his advantage. This is the central problem with the Democratic party.
Dan, New York, USA
Kevin, is there any feeling in the people you meet of a tarnished electoral system, especially after 2000? There are armies of lawyers for both parties already arguing up and down the land, and big business has paid for both candidates. Are Americans wrong to view America as the finest democracy in the world or is it the detractors who are getting too much attention, or is this just not an issue to the people you meet?
Dan, Kent, UK
I was chatting online to someone in California the other day, when he asked how I, as a British person, thought the election would go. I was unsure and stated that Bush unnerved me, which was when I was made aware that I was talking to a Bush supporter. The fact that he didn't seem to care about how Bush was perceived abroad made me wonder whether American people are finding the international view of America to be a major factor in their voting decisions, or whether the anti-war sentiment is based solely on casualties rather than how they're perceived by other countries?
Daniel, Lincoln, UK
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~46~RS~)
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