WHEN THE LAST calculator has churned out the last recount total and Al Bush or George Gore has his legs safely stretched across one edge of the Oval Office desk, the lesson of Election 2000 will remain: there are lies, there are damned lies and there are exit polls.

I'm sitting here confronted by the front page headline in London's Daily Mail newspaper with its pointed reminder of just where this unparalleled fiasco in the American political process is taking place: "What a Mickey Mouse Way to Run a Country."

Another local rag, The Daily Telegraph, displays a cartoon featuring a sign in front of Disneyesque castles and turrets: "Welcome to Florida's LawyerWorld, Where All Your Fees Come True." Which gives you a pretty good idea of how the bemused folk of the Old Country view this demonstration of democracy in action.

It is bad enough that one's homeland has become a laughingstock in the eyes of its former masters. Americans and British at least speak the same language, more or less, so theoretically we should be able in this extended family to take what amounts to a joke in the Laurel and Hardy school of comedy.

But it gets really tetchy when a Lebanese newspaper, As-Safir, apologizes for declaring Al Gore the winner, with the addendum: "We are used to a deep-rooted Arab tradition of democracy where results are first declared, then elections are conducted and votes brought in to affirm it."

Which does seem the way that some in Florida and perhaps elsewhere in the United States would like to see things run, but that's perhaps another debate.

It really doesn't matter, mind you, whether Dubya or Big Al goes to the White House. The nation has survived two world wars, Millard Fillmore and nearly having the turkey named as the national bird, so having an ex-drunk driver or someone who believes he invented the Internet at the helm is just a matter of getting used to another turkey.

What is irksome is how this farce came about in the first place. The answer is the exit poll, that pernicious practice of predicting election results that should have been shot at birth two decades ago. To put faith in it requires the sort of trust it takes to set up a long-term investment firm on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens.

Exit polling involves the not particularly subtle art of sticking a microphone in the face of a voter fresh from casting his or her ballot and demanding to know whom he or she voted for. "Representative samples" are fed into a computer, and out churns the answer for TV pundits to relay to the known universe as gospel.

The flaws are obvious, and I'm astounded only at how long it has taken them to surface. While I'm a pretty wretched golfer and I think Tina Turner would best be used as an air raid siren, I consider myself a reasonably normal voter - one who believes who he voted for is his business and absolutely no one else's.

Thus my reasoned response to someone poking a mike in my face with a nosy question behind it would be to stick it where the sun doesn't shine, and in fact I would probably lend my physical assistance to helping a perhaps reluctant questioner to accomplish this.

There is, however, a more sensible approach. Should you be confronted by an exit pollster, my advice is to lie through your teeth. If enough of us pull together next time, we should have Florida's 25 electoral votes, or Texas's 32, or Tennessee's 11, firmly in the bag for Calvin Coolidge by 8:10 EST.

Pollsters in Britain haven't really been taken seriously since the early 1990s, when they learned what a lying pack of dingos British voters can be. What happened was that the pollsters' prediction of a landslide for a balding political hack named Neil Kinnock became a landslide for a white-haired political hack named John Major.

What surprises me is that America's voters haven't yet woken up to the wondrous damage that telling porkies (pork pies - lies) to poll takers can do to that malign profession. Perhaps Florida has made them aware of the destructive potential and, come 2004, they will act accordingly.

In the meantime, exit polls should be outlawed across the land, and any violators should be made to watch every single episode ever made of the Jerry Springer Show, recidivists to suffer the same fate again plus a full rerun of Ricki Lake.

I was also appalled to discover that in America - the land that gave us the Trump Tower, stretch limousines and chili dawgs - some voters, the ones in Palm Beach, Florida, are still using a sort of punch card to cast their ballots. And it is causing them to make mistakes and vote for the wrong candidate.

There is a suspicion lingering in the back of my brain that the good folk of Palm Beach should be relieved of pencils, pens and other sharp implements before being allowed into a voting booth, and that once inside they be required to vote orally or by blinking their eyes - once if for Candidate No. 1, twice for No. 2, and so on.

But punch cards also are flawed. In the days before microchip computers, IBM punch cards, with rows and rows of holes signifying a code of some sort, were used for billing purposes. I found them to be a useful weapon in my war against the General Telephone Company in Texas.

GenTel seemed incapable of human replies to my queries about erroneous bills they kept sending me. Next month, I purchased a bus conductor's punch and added some holes of my own to their little card and sent it back.

The following month, when I received another wrong bill, I moistened their IBM card by putting it between my lips, thus causing the card to swell ever so slightly. When it hit their sorting rack, I'm told, it couldn't fit into a slot and sent thousands of other cards exploding across the room.

I received a letter from General Telephone allowing as how they didn't know what I was doing to their cards, but whatever it was, I was to cease and desist. I wadded up the letter, sent it back to them and went off to Vietnam for a few years.

Maybe they set up shop printing ballots down in Palm Beach.

Thought for the Week: The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

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