Well it ought to be "Whoever becomes president will do so because their political party will be cagier, stronger, more unified and partisan" - and this means that they get more people voting for them.

Once the voting is done, it should be is purely and simply an administrative matter of making sure that noone stops people casting their votes and a technical matter of counting the votes accurately. But somehow the partisanship and the manoeuvring and so forth that was appropriate duiring teh campaign was allowed to dominate and distort the voting stage.

And that's not a council of perfection, "in an ideal world", it's how most democratic countries do it, without needing to make a lotr of fuss about it, and without anybody - God Forbid! - trying to interfere with the process of counting or recounting the votes either by legal chicanery or extralegal methods.

And if anyone starts talking (and I've already heard the TV pundits doing it) about how all this has demonstratedt a robust democractic process in action, where the battle is carried on in a combative but fundamentally healthy way, and that kind of guff, it's total crap. Not healthy, sick, and in some danger.