US: In the aftermath of the election, Democrats are going through the five stages of grief: denial followed by anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Many are still at the denial stage to judge by the conspiracy theories burning up the Internet. These make the case that the election was stolen (again).
A cyberspace furore has been ignited with theories of fraud and malpractice.
Some bloggers make a compelling case, like Kathy Dopp, a mathematician in Salt Lake City who discovered anomalies in the voting in Florida and posted them on her website, ustogether.org.
She showed inexplicable gains for George Bush in counties using optically-scanned paper ballots.
For example in Hillsborough County, 35 per cent of voters are registered as Republicans and 42 per cent as Democrats, but on election day the county cast 242,000 votes for Bush and 211,000 for John Kerry.
In Baker County, with 13,000 registered voters, 69 per cent of them Democrats and 24 per cent Republicans, the vote was 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush. In other parts of the US, registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
The Democratic candidate led in early exit polls in Florida, which was won by Bush, and Dopp argues that the likelihood of final results being significantly different from exit polls is "very, very small".
Other websites claim that Bush's vote tallies in Florida "are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable", to quote consortiumnews.com, and that there must have been systematic vote-rigging.
Computer irregularities in Ohio, another swing state which Bush won narrowly after being behind in exit polls, have also got the attention of the bloggers.
An electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes but records indicated that only 638 voters cast ballots in the precinct and that Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.
Franklin County is the only Ohio county to use a machine made by Danaher Controls.
Around the country some 75,000 touch-screen electronic voting machines were supplied by Ohio-based Diebold, whose chief executive, Walden O'Dell, fuelled the conspiracy theories by writing in invitations to a fund-raiser for Bush at his home in Columbus, that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president".
(He later regretted his choice of words).
Diebold insists that its machines are not vulnerable to hacking but many partisans wonder why Florida Republicans opposed paper back-up.
Doubts about the election results have been supported by some academics like Prof Zvi Drezner of California State University's Fullerton business school, who was reported in The Washington Post as saying that "the exit polls did not 'lie' " and he had "a gut feeling that the machines did not report the correct count".
Many Democrats have, however, got past the denial stage and the conspiracy theories are not finding much traction where it counts - the mainstream media.
Several political analysts point out that many Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections.
The Ohio case was spotted and corrected, said the Columbus director of elections. The leading lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio said he had not seen anything to suggest intentional manipulation of the vote.
And while 31,000 reports of election shenanigans have been compiled by Verified Voting, a group which monitors electronic machine results, they would not apparently overturn the election result.
A Kerry campaign spokesman said in Washington, "We can change the future, we can't rewrite the past. The simple fact of the matter is that Republicans received more votes than Democrats, and we're not contesting this election."
The second stage of Democratic grief - anger - has found an outlet in an email that is going the rounds among partisans in the blue states.
It is a long furious rant against southerners in red states who voted for Bush. It rages about federal money going from blue states to red states, and about how the American values that the red states embrace came from the despised north-east, etc.
"Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate, you marriage-hyping (blanks)?" it asks. "Well? Can you guess? It's (blanking) Massachusetts, the (blanking) center of the gay marriage universe.
"Yes, that's right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the (blanking) nation.
"Think that's just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are (blanking) blue states, (ass-blank), and most are in the North-east, where our values suck so bad."
Much of the anger of Democrats finds expression in the New York Times columns of Maureen Dowd, who was attacked this week by pro-Bush Democratic Senator Zel Miller on NBC's Imus in the Morning radio show as a "high-brow hussy from New York".
The more she writes those columns, the redder these states get, said Miller, who recently challenged MSNBC's Chris Matthews on air to a duel.
Dowd's response: "I'm not a high-brow hussy from New York. I'm a high-brow hussy from Washington, Senator.
"Pistols or swords?"
Hillary Clinton has evidently reached the bargaining stage, if she was ever really grieving for a result that makes her a leading Democratic contender in 2008. In Boston this week, the New York Senator told a Tufts University audience that it was a mistake for Democrats not to engage evangelical Christians. The Bible should be used to win debates over poverty the way Republicans tried to use it on gay marriage, she said.
"Jesus had a lot more to say about how we treat the poor than most of the issues that were talked about in this election."
When she went on to note that a woman had run for president of Afghanistan and that this was more than Americans had been able to achieve, the 5,000 "Hillary 08" partisans in the hall got the message and went wild.
But enough already, says film-maker Michael Moore. "The official mourning period is over today and there is a silver lining - George W. Bush is prohibited by law from running again," he said. Moore is now working on his next documentary - Fahrenheit 9/11½.