COUNTING DOWN to an election day expected to draw record turnout, voting-rights watchdogs are sounding the alarm that a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000 could occur in any of a dozen battleground states.
Voting-rights advocates in Colorado, for example, told a federal judge on Wednesday that almost 30,000 voters were recently purged in violation of federal voting-rights law and should be restored in time for voting.
Lawsuits are already flying in many states. The two presidential campaigns are also preparing to deal with lawsuits over the outcome by joining lawyers from non-profit groups who are fanning out by the thousands to monitor the polls. The Barack Obama campaign is expected to send 5,000 lawyer volunteers to Florida alone.
The Obama campaign, Cable News Network (CNN) and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have set up hotlines, with CNN fielding more than 15,000 calls since October 15th.
Across the battleground states, where Democrats had a two-to- one advantage in new registrations, voting-rights groups contend that the 11th-hour verifications demanded by Republican officials are partisan attempts to disenfranchise the new voters.
The flood of millions of first-time voters across the country could lead to crowded and contentious polling places, triggering last-minute identity checks that could deny ballots to those whose names or addresses do not match government records.
Common Cause, the American Bar Association, the League of Women Voters and a phalanx of other public interest groups are urging states to ensure the polls are adequately staffed. Voting advocates are most worried about states such as Virginia, which has one of the lowest ratios of voting machines to registered voters.
"Voters will simply walk away if the lines are too long," warned Susannah Goodman, who directs the election reform programme at Common Cause, a campaign reform group based in Washington. "They don't want to, but they may have a job they have to get to and they have to go."
Congress enacted legislation in 2002 in response to the Florida debacle two years earlier.
The law provided $3 billion (€2.3 billion) for new equipment and statewide registries, but the sheer volume of new voters - as many as nine million nationwide - has overwhelmed efforts to verify their eligibility.
Litigation brought in recent weeks in Ohio, Georgia, Florida and Colorado may serve to alert voters about the possibility that they may be challenged. In many states, though, the verification methods have created more obstacles than they have removed.
In Florida, an aggressive "no match, no vote" standard has been applied to question whether more than 10,000 of those who have signed up since the start of the year should be given ballots.
Florida, Mississippi, New Jersey, South Carolina and Tennessee have all seen justice department filings alleging misconduct related to minority voting.
In Georgia, a three-judge federal panel ruled that election officials needed justice department approval to check voters' immigration status. A Republican Party suit in Indiana alleging registration fraud seeks to shut down early voting in four counties.
Voting-rights groups, both nonpartisan and Democrat-aligned, have compiled lists of vulnerable voters and have tried to track them down. "We're engaged in protecting voters from being disenfranchised by virtue of typos and clerical errors," said Adam Skaggs, a lawyer with New York University's Brennan Centre for Justice.
He said the likelihood of fraud had been "vastly inflated" and discrepancies were overwhelmingly the result of innocent mistakes or outdated voter registries.
In Montana, authorities sought recently to drop 6,000 voters from the rolls because of address changes, including soldiers serving in Iraq, Mr Skaggs noted.
A Brennan Centre study of ballot designs found problems in North Carolina, where voters who choose a one-touch straight-party option on voting machines may not notice that the presidential race is not included and requires a separate vote.
In Ohio, the candidates for the top office are split between two pages, which could lead some voters to invalidate their ballots by choosing one on each.
In Georgia, the voter registry has been scrutinised for potential non-citizen entries and thousands of people - most with Hispanic names - have been flagged for special identity checks if they seek to cast a ballot.
Lawsuits challenging election officials' plans to deny ballots in cases of mismatches in at least six states have been shot down by the courts.
Citing news reports from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Florida, grassroots community activist group Acorn warned last week that Republican officials in those states had hinted at intentions to scan foreclosure filings to identify voters who are no longer living at the address on their registration.
The John McCain campaign has focused in recent weeks on attacking the voter registration efforts of Acorn. However, McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said the campaign had confidence in most local election officials.
"For the most part, these things are handled properly," he said. - ( Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)