I suppose the new face of the issue, this time around, is that Sandy will matter much more to the vote than any individual voter, or even any group of five hundred voters in an individual state. Both directly - making it harder to get to polling stations, wrecking some people's ID papers, illness - and indirectly because of the reporting on the hurricane (probably good for Obama) and some cancelled events. But I'm not counting on any suggestions to move the elections ahead three or four days, although it would probably be possible...
Tight elections? Yes, they occur even outside of the US. Two years ago around here, the parliamentory elections came down to a margin of 26 votes in two regions in western Sweden. If the liberal party, which was and is part of the cabinet coalition - and which isn't a big one because so many of the others have gone liberal in some way - had got those votes or had got thirty more of their own core voters out, there would have been a safe majority - and there's no electoral college here. For a population óf American size the margin would have been slightly below a thousand ballots. But that was in a multi-party system - with two cabinet alternatives, each backed by three or four outfits, and there was a newcomer, um, ultra-right wing party involved that no one really wanted to be supported by, so it was a bit special.