US elections: media wary as exit polls collapse

The Republicans and Democrats were neck and neck last night in their battle for control of the Senate in the US mid-term elections.

According to unofficial exit polls in the eight most closely fought seats, the Republicans were leading in four, the Democrats in three, with one other to close to call, and many votes yet to be cast.

With the entire House of Representatives, a third of the 100-seat Senate and 36 state governorships at stake, an already nailbiting evening for the major parties promised to become even tenser as the revamped exit polling system for the major TV networks failed to work properly.

The system was revamped after the debacle of the presidential election in 2000, when the networks – using exit polls and fragmentary early results – twice wrongly called the result in Florida, the state which would ultimately hand George Bush the White House.

Yesterday, a last-minute computer test revealed flaws in the new system, leaving analysts to rely on raw vote counts through the evening.

Despite widespread fears, voting appeared to run reasonably smoothly in Florida, after the turmoil of two years ago. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, was in a tight race with the Democrat Bill McBride, who was banking on mobilised aggrieved supporters of Al Gore in 2000 to exact revenge for the latter's defeat.

The stakes were highest for President Bush, who has campaigned intensely for his party's candidates. A Republican sweep of both chambers on Capitol Hill would be a massive boost before his probable re-election bid in 2004. Mr Bush could become the third president in a century to gain House seats in a mid-term election after Franklin Roosevelt in 1934 and Bill Clinton in 1998.

After voting in his home state of Texas, Mr Bush was back in the White House last night, watching the returns come in with senior Congressional Republicans, including the Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Mr Hastert almost certainly will retain that post, whatever the overall outcome of the vote for the 108th Congress. Thanks to the tiny number of genuinely competitive contests the Republicans were expected to retain their majority.

In the outgoing Congress, the Republicans had a 223 to 208 edge over the Democrats with two independents.