Editor's note: Due to election coverage and the fact that German journalists and editorial writers are glued to their televisions rather than their keyboards, fishwrap is taking a one-day hiatus. It will be back in full force Thursday.

The US elections continue to dominate coverage in German newspapers on Tuesday. The news pages lead with headlines pointing to Bush and Kerry's parity in the polls. The front pages of both the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the Financial Times Deutschland carry the same headline: "Bush and Kerry Equal." The more conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says the same thing, below the fold but with kid gloves: "America Anticipates a Close Decision."

Ironically, German editorialists are strangely silent today, taking a break from their otherwise incessant pre-election musings. Maybe they are just getting some extra sleep before Tuesday's all-nighter. News from the first exit polls isn't expected to reach Central Europe until about 3 a.m. Wednesday morning. Despite the editorial pause, two articles are worth noting.

The first is a column in the right-leaning Die Welt by Hannes Stein in which the author describes a recent visit to Berlin's Café Einstein with an American Democrat. Stein says something few Germans would: "I would vote for Bush." His line of reasoning? "At the moment, I'm only interested in one thing: that the Americans carry on the war against Islamic fundamentalism as aggressively as possible because it's a murderous and suicidal totalitarian mass movement like National Socialism or Communism. In that regard I simply trust Bush more than the all-too breezy Kerry." Stein backs up his reasoning by noting what he calls "good progress" in the war on terror. "Two enemy regimes have been toppled in Afghanistan and Iraq," he writes. "Afghanistan just had its first free elections. The government in Pakistan has been forced to participate in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. And the Saudis now know where the axe will fall next." Of course, Stein doesn't have a passport and "it's better that way," his American friend answers. After all, "your Bush has crushed every attempt to form a social state or up environmental awareness. And there will never be gay marriage under this reactionary president."

The second is a guest editorial by Gert Wagner of the German Economic Institute and Edward Castronova of Indiana University. In the business daily Handelsblatt, they note the "absurdity" of America's electoral college system calling it a Byzantine system that distorts the true will of the people. Instead of appointing an electoral college based on a Census determined using statistical sampling that misses five percent of the population, the authors call for the completely unconventional idea of a telephone presidential poll. The authors say that while imperfect, the system would be a lot more honest than the electoral college system which can allow a candidate who has not won the majority of voters to carry the election. "If instead of a general free election in the US a telephone poll were to be conducted of, say, a half a percentage point of voters, about 500,000, the statistical sampling error rate would be almost zero and all votes would be correctly tallied." Even if some of the people are missed because they only have a mobile phone, this "distortion would not be as grave as those which occur in the actual election."

The US election isn't the only poll to get the attention of the German press. Sunday's controversial election in Ukraine is also discussed in a handful of dailies, with two major leaguers criticizing the EU for the quagmire  Kiev politics have become. Irregularities have marred an election that could determine whether Ukraine steers towards an authoritarian future or whether it will look to the European model of democracy. With neither candidate clearing the 50 percent hurdle, a run-off vote is planned in three weeks between Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.

"Is it any wonder that the current government in Kiev is always fleeing under Putin's coat?" asks the conservative Die Welt. After all, compared to its gestures towards Turkey, the European Union has done little to court Ukraine -- there is no EU associative treaty and no new form of cooperation with NATO. "The possibilities for the influence of the West would be greater if the EU and NATO had ... exercised their magnet policies toward Ukraine," it concludes.

The left-leaning Sueddeutsche also criticizes Brussels and Berlin for failing to have a "discernable plan" for Ukraine. At the same time, "the Kiev government of post-Communist functionaries, who have been implicated in numerous corruption scandals, has largely ignored the EU's recommendations for reform." But even as Europe sits on the sidelines, Russia is taking an active role in Ukraine, with Putin hoping to bring the country into its post-Soviet security system. Russian companies and banks already control large sections of Ukraine's industrial and financial sectors and Putin sent his best campaign advisors to Kiev to help Yanukovych in his election campaign. Putin fears, the paper writes, that opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko would break the country's Russia-linked oligarchies and instead seek western investment -- a move the country's younger generation supports. "The younger generation is waiting for a signal from Berlin, Brussels or Washington. ... But they know that if Yanukovych is declared winner in three weeks, Europe will remain closed to them for a long time."