US: Absentee ballots not delivered, long lines at polls, confusing ballot papers, too few voting machines in minority areas, electronic machines malfunctioning: these were among an array of voting problems that arose in the 2004 presidential election and have fuelled suspicions of electoral malpractice.
They were cited at the first session of a Commission on Federal Election Reform co-chaired by former Democratic president Jimmy Carter and former Republican secretary of state James Baker.
The foul-ups in the 2004 voting were cited by a dozen election experts testifying at the American University in Washington on how to improve the US voting system. While the commission will not pass judgment on the validity of the presidential election, its report in September will recommend to Congress changes that could make the troubled American voting system more transparent.
Currently, however, there is no uniform system of voting throughout the 50 states, which allows for a wide variety of ballot papers and voting procedures, and, in some cases, the use of partisan officials to conduct elections.
Prof Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School told the commission that in the 2004 election the US "came much closer to electoral meltdown, violence in the streets and constitutional crisis than most people realise".
In a written submission he stated that "less than a 2 per cent swing among Ohio voters - about 100,000 voters - toward Democratic candidate for president John Kerry and away from incumbent Republican president Bush would have placed the Ohio - and national - election for president well within the 'margin of litigation', and it would have gotten ugly very quickly".
President Carter said that the overall concern was that 40 per cent of the American people do not vote. Also there was a great deal of doubt in the country about the integrity of the electoral process. "Obviously we want to have more access by Americans to the voting booth," he said, "and secondly, we want to make sure that the electoral process has integrity - that it is not shot through with fraud."
The commission will not consider changing the electoral college system or redrawing constituencies. "We should not take on the really volatile issues with respect to which we have no reasonable chance of success," Mr Baker said. It will inquire whether paperless electronic voting machines are prone to fraud, a source of great concern to voting reform activists.
Electronic voting is almost totally opaque, said Prof David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University.
"Voters have no means to confirm that the machines have recorded their votes correctly, nor will they have any assurance that their votes won't be changed at some later time."
Only 12 US states require a vote-by-vote paper trail. Some states, like Georgia and Maryland, have started using paperless machines made by Diebold.
"We may well recommend that an electronic system be combined with a paper trail," Mr Carter told a news conference after Monday's hearing.
Mr Carter and former president Gerald Ford co-chaired a similar commission after the disputed 2000 presidential election which led to some changes.