Congress will close the books on the bitterly fought November presidential election this Thursday, when the House and Senate meet in a joint session to officially ratify George W. Bush's Electoral College victory.

Such certification is almost always a routine process. To most Americans, it merely reaffirms the obvious about a contest that's already history.

Bush haters should get over it and move on, they say.

But a persistent and significant group of voters is not moving anywhere, not until some straight answers are forthcoming.

To them, 2004 was worse than the Florida fiasco of 2000. It was further proof that something is drastically wrong with our nation's patchwork voting system.

Black voters and their elected leaders are carrying the brunt of the fight, especially in Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes were the key to the Bush victory.

During a series of postelection hearings, Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) collected "thousands of complaints" from Ohio voters, many of them black, about Election Day irregularities, a Conyers spokeswoman said yesterday.

Those complaints allege that minority and urban voters were disproportionately disenfranchised in a state where the President's margin over Sen. John Kerry was fewer than 119,000 votes.

The massive outcry has convinced Conyers and most other members of the Congressional Black Caucus to challenge the final certification of the vote on Thursday.

But unless the dissidents in the House can convince at least one U.S. senator to join them in their challenge, they will not even be able to force a full-fledged debate by each branch of Congress over the results.

In previous columns, I provided details about many of the voting irregularities.

There were so many unexplained problems that two minor parties, the Greens and the Libertarians, formed an uncommon alliance and raised more than $100,000 to force a recount in all 88 of Ohio's counties.

But that recount, which was concluded just before Christmas, sparked almost as much furor as the original vote. It only stoked the worst paranoid fears among Bush opponents about a Ukraine-style manipulation of the vote.

The strange recount even got the Kerry-Edwards campaign, which originally conceded the election, to get more involved. In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court, the National Voting Rights Institute, joined by the Kerry campaign, has petitioned for a second recount in Ohio.

Enough already?

Just remember that in Washington state, two machine counts of the governor's race left the Republican candidate with a tiny lead. Only a third count - this one by hand - reversed the original results and gave the seat to the Democrat.

Meanwhile, in Ohio, the litany of irregularities and acts alleged in the recount lawsuit is chilling.

State law, for example, stipulates that each county must do a hand recount of at least 3% of the votes cast by randomly choosing precincts. If there is a discrepancy between the machine count and the hand count, then all votes in the county must be recounted by hand.

But according to the lawsuit, in county after county, officials refused to randomly select the initial precincts for a hand recount, with each county determining what to recount by its own arbitrary methods.

In some cases, when challenged by Green Party observers, election officials telephoned Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell for instructions.

Blackwell, the top election supervisor in the state, had been the co-chair of the Bush campaign in Ohio - a virtual replay of Katherine Harris' role in Florida.

As secretary of state, Blackwell also decides who all the top election staff in each county will be - Democrats as well as Republicans.

In some counties, Green Party observers were kept more than 20 feet away from the recount, where they could not see the actual ballots.

A hearing on the petition for a clean recount in Ohio will not be held until later this month. By then, Congress will have certified the vote.

Even the "democratic elections" Bush has been pressing for war-torn Iraq may be over before Ohio's recount is resolved.

Juan Gonzalez is a Daily News columnist. Email: jgonzalez@ edit.nydailynews.com  

© Copyright 2005 New York Daily News

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