Republican John McCain said that as president he would work to protect religious freedom, fight human trafficking and eliminate child pornography from the Internet, adding that Americans have a moral obligation to act on the issues.

"Confronting evil has never been easy -- in our age or any other," McCain said at a town hall meeting at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. "But the failure to do so affects even those who are complacent with our own blessings and secure in our human rights."

McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is campaigning in a state that his party lost in the last four presidential contests. Yesterday, he pledged that "we will fight, we will contest, we will win the state of Michigan."

Calling human trafficking, such as forced prostitution, an "evil form of 21st century slavery," McCain said he would work to dismantle jurisdictional turf battles between bureaucracies and to ensure that "we have a coordinated international response to this scourge."

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The nation was kept waiting into yesterday morning for the outcome of Indiana's Democratic presidential primary as election officials in Lake County struggled to count what they described as an unprecedented number of absentee ballots cast.

Long delays in counting the votes in Lake County factored in the delay in declaring a winner in Tuesday's hotly contested primary, where Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton posted a narrow victory over Sen. Barack Obama. No results were posted in Lake until hours after the polls closed, and the outcome was not determined until about midnight.

Roughly 11,300 absentee ballots and early votes were cast in the race in the northwest Indiana county; nearly three times the number in the 2004 primary.

Heavy turnout also played a role, said Sally La Sota, director of the Lake County Board of Elections and Registration.

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McCain pretended to snarl when asked about his temper yesterday.

"How dare you ask that question!" McCain said, chuckling. His questioner persisted, reading a comment by a fellow Republican, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, that the idea of McCain as the GOP presidential nominee sent a chill down his spine.

"I'm all too familiar with the quote," said McCain, who has since smoothed things over with his colleague.

McCain said he does get angry -- about corruption and runaway spending in Washington. "You know something, the American people are angry, too, and they're not going to take it anymore," he said.

If he really had a temper problem, McCain said, he would not have been able to work with fellow senators such as Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat; Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat; and his friend, Joseph I. Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee who now is an independent.

"I've worked across the aisle more than any other senator I know," McCain said.