KEY POINTS:
The US presidential election is threatened by chaos as voter turnout, expected to reach record levels today, could overwhelm a creaking electoral system in which faulty electronic voting machines record the wrong candidate's name and votes registered by pencil risk being disqualified.
Both sides will have teams of
lawyers on hand to record any evidence of irregularities. In several key states, there are warnings of shortages of ballot papers and touch-screen machines which could severely delay results.
Senator Barack Obama is predicted to secure well over the 270 electoral college votes he needs to claim victory.
Turnout is expected to be massive, especially among blacks determined to see the first African-American president. The young and the very old are also expected in huge numbers.
While it is taking place in the world's most technologically advanced country, the vote will also be a decidedly low-tech affair in most states, and experts expect tallies and legal challenges to continue late into the night.
Concerns about irregularities mean that some two-thirds of voters will pick up a pencil to cast their votes today.
Even that will not guarantee a safe vote as the counting of paper ballots is done by optical scanners and the smallest error can lead to disqualified or spoilt ballots.
An error could be as simple as a first-time voter filling in an oval incorrectly.
Some errors will be caught and corrected at the polling centres, but many votes are being counted at central county areas where any uncertain pencil marks on paper ballots will be disqualified.
Touch-screen machines, used in crucial battleground states including Pennsylvania and Virginia, leave no paper trail, so if the machines crash or are hacked into, the true voting record can be impossible to detect or rectify, critics complain.
In Colorado, Texas, Tennessee and West Virginia, where touch-screen electronic voting machines are in use, some early voters saw the machines flip the votes they had cast for Barack Obama in favour of John McCain. In some cases the opposite occurred.
A federal overhaul of elections after the disputed Florida "hanging chads" contest of 2000 has not removed fears that officials will engage in systemic voter suppression.
There are concerns that many votes will not be counted and that tens of thousands of voters, some with criminal convictions, will have their votes discarded.
There are also concerns that officials will attempt to suppress the votes of students, ethnic minorities, the elderly, the poor and the transient.
Senator John McCain recently complained that "one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country " is under way by a voter registration organisation named Acorn, which has loose links to Barack Obama's campaign".
Then, President George W. Bush leaped into the furore by asking the Justice Department to determine whether 200,000 newly registered Ohio voters should have their identities confirmed.
The request was rejected by the Supreme Court, but the President seems to have violated department policy by ordering the investigation.
But Democrats fear that a combination of voter suppression tactics and legal challenges could be used effectively to diminish an Obama victory.
There are legal challenges in four states - Mississippi, Tennessee, Arizona and Washington - against laws that deny prisoners and former prisoners the right to vote, even after they have served their sentences.
"It's mass confusion," said Nancy Abudu, of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging a voter suppression law in Tennessee.
The law requires those with convictions to pay any child support owed and satisfy all restitution requirements from their sentences before they can vote.
- INDEPENDENT
