The group Focus on the Family which has been sending out voter registration packs to evangelical churches

The group Focus on the Family, which has been sending out voter registration packs to evangelical churches across the US, is based there. The group recently organised a boycott of Proctor and Gamble products claiming the company supports gay marriage and “support the political agenda of the homosexual movement”.Meanwhile the pro-choice group Catholics for a Free Choice has accused the Most Rev Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Denver, of trying to influence the election by urging Catholics to vote only for candidates opposed to abortion and stem cell research.Challenging the archdiocese’s tax-exempt status, the group said: “Without mentioning anyone by name, the archdiocese has frequently equated a vote for certain candidates as sinful and even outright ‘evil’.” The Republicans are certainly fighting hard for the state of 4.3 million people. The Zogby tracking poll scored the contest 48-47 in favour of Mr Kerry yesterday.”I am going to vote for Kerry,” said John Anderson, walking along Boulder’s pedestrianised Pearl Street on Thursday night, an area of bookshops, smart restaurants and brew-pubs. “I have to say one of the biggest issues for me has been the war, military issues, the way America has acted internationally.”But if Boulder is unashamedly liberal, places such as Colorado Springs are the opposite. “I don’t expect to know who my president is come Wednesday,” said Mrs Bond, an artist, stepping out of a supermarket in Boulder on a crisp autumn morning yesterday.
“I think it is going to be a real mess I voted for Gore in 2000 and I thought he was robbed.

There were lots of dirty tricks – I think it is the same this time.”For students of the process of electoral meltdown, Colorado may be the place to be – a Florida in the mountains. Adding to the potential for chaos is a separate initiative contained on the ballot which, if passed, would divide the state’s nine electoral votes on a proportional basis, rather than the current winner-takes-all system.It was never meant to be like this. It was up to them.The question now is what will be the effect on the campaign. Some experts say it will play to the belief of Americans that Mr Bush is more likely to keep them safe – and tip a desperately close election his way.But the opposite may happen. Voters may be reminded that the man who has for the first time explicitly admitted he was behind the 11 September terror attacks is still at large, strengthening the feeling that the war against Iraq was a mistake, a distraction from the real war against Bin Laden and international terrorism.. Deborah Bond was under no illusions about the potential problems that lay ahead.

Nor, by the same token, is he likely to launch an attack to disrupt the election – for the simple reason that at this late stage, it would merely see Americans rallying around their President, as happened after the 11 September attacks.In fact, Bin Laden’s appeal to the American people was ambiguous. Their security was, he said, in the hands of neither Bush nor Kerry, nor even al-Qa’ida. Not for two years had he appeared in a video.The new tape, showing the terrorist leader very much alive and in apparent good health, appears to have been made within the past seven weeks, and might have been recorded even more recently.The political impact is as hard to gauge as Bin Laden’s motives for making it. They believe that a second Bush term, and a continuation of this administration’s unqualified support for Israel, will ensure that the United States will remain deeply unpopular in the Arab world, thus playing into Bin Laden’s hands.Mr Bush’s hardline policies, according to this school of thought, have turned Iraq into a hotbed of terrorists.It has thus become easier for al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorist groups to recruit new members from an ever-widening pool of radicals, convinced that violence is the only means of securing change.If this theory is correct, then Bin Laden would do nothing to indicate support for Mr Kerry. His warning that the best way of avoiding another disaster (like 11 September 2001) was to avoid provoking Arab anger, might be taken as an oblique endorsement of the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.That raises the question of whether Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri want President George Bush to win or lose next week.Republicans claim that the al-Qa’ida leaders are on the run, and would far prefer to have a “weak and indecisive” Democrat President in the White House.Other analysts say that assumption may be mistaken. Even they, however, must have been taken aback by the bravado of the performance.Of late, Bin Laden’s voice had been heard only in crackly audiotapes.