Word: florida
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...This kind of neck-and-neck finish would put a tremendous strain on any state's electoral infrastructure (see Ohio in 2004). So the question looming like Spanish moss in Tallahassee is, Has Florida girded itself adequately since 2000 to keep whatever cracks haven't been fixed - especially in trouble spots like Palm Beach - from turning a tight race into a real mess...
...good news is that Florida's current governor, Republican Charlie Crist, is driven more by common sense than by ideology. After taking office last year, he scrapped the antiquated punch-card ballots (e.g., the butterfly ballot) as well as the flawed touch-screen voting machines favored by his conservative predecessor, Jeb Bush (the President's brother, who was governor from 1999 to 2007). A big reason: in a 2006 congressional race in Sarasota County, an incredible 15% of ballots cast on touch-screen machines registered no choice at all - in a race decided by a razor-thin margin...
...Another Crist dividend: Kurt Browning, his appointed secretary of state, who oversees elections, is actually an elections-management professional. Few can forget the secretary of state under Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, who oversaw the 2000 recount. Harris, Florida's last elected secretary of state, had no elections expertise and looked all but clueless when the chads hit the fan. Worse, her pledge of impartiality seemed laughable given that she was the George W. Bush campaign's Florida chairwoman. Browning, who like Crist has proved to be a more bipartisan operator than his predecessors, spent 26 years as a county elections...
...this is still Florida, after all, and the potential for a breakdown has to be considered. Optical-scan technology is relatively reliable, for example, but it's also slower - some delays due to technical glitches with the new machines were reported during Florida's early voting - and with expected turnout approaching 80% in Florida, voting-rights advocates worry about congestion and overload. Stoking the anxiety is a shortage of poll workers in larger counties like Broward, where Fort Lauderdale is located. And McCrea warns that the Florida legislature hasn't provided for enough mandatory post-election vote audits. (It requires...
...bigger worry is Florida's central voter database. In a state whose residents are as transient as Florida's, concerns about who is eligible and ineligible to vote are always acute - especially since Florida now has a "no match, no vote" law that tightens voter-identification requirements at the polls. The database against which IDs are checked failed miserably in 2000, when thousands of appropriately registered voters, especially African Americans, were turned away at polling sites. (Many were mistakenly pegged as convicted felons, who at that time were ineligible to vote in Florida even after serving their sentences; Crist...