Let the recounts begin

• Voter ID. The Help America Vote Act forced states to revisit many of their own election laws. In the process, several states added rules requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls. Advocates of such requirements argue that they will cut down on fraud. Opponents say that black voters are less likely than their white counterparts to have driver's licenses, the most common form of photo ID, and that the requirement disenfranchises legitimate voters. The Democratic Party, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the League of Women Voters have challenged ID requirements in court, while Republican secretaries of state and the American Center for Voting Rights, a Virginia-based group, have defended them.

Only Indiana will have a strict photo ID requirement in effect on Election Day; the legal challenge to that rule is not expected to be settled by then. Georgia's and Missouri's photo ID rules were struck down in court, so other forms of identification -- such as utility bills -- can be presented at polling places. Arizona voters must bring a photo ID or two other forms of identification. On October 20, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted [PDF] a lower-court injunction that had kept Arizona's identification requirements from taking effect. The Court stressed that it was not yet ruling on whether the controversial rules are constitutional.

Ohio, meanwhile, had plans to impose an additional requirement on some voters. A state law would have forced naturalized citizens, if challenged, to show proof of citizenship before they could vote. A federal court struck down [PDF] that mandate.

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Because many legal challenges are unresolved, election observers worry that voters and poll workers will be confused about what requirements are in force on Election Day -- and that their confusion could produce chaotic situations and still more lawsuits. Mary Wilson, president of the League of Women Voters, said that her organization is trying "to make sure voters know where to go to vote and the types of identification they need to go to the polls."

• Voter rolls. States are struggling to comply with the Help America Vote Act's insistence that they create statewide voter-registration databases. Traditionally, such databases have been kept at the local level, so there was nothing to prevent voters from being registered in more than one locale simultaneously. Duplicate registration is normally just the result of a voter's moving from one district to another and not being dropped from the first locale's voter lists. However, deliberate fraud can happen: Fifty-two people have been convicted of federal election fraud since 2002.

Earlier this month, Thor Hearne, counsel for the American Center for Voting Rights, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that in some Missouri counties, the number of registered voters exceeds the number of voting-age residents. States have begun culling ineligible voters from the rolls by checking their new databases for dead voters, felons who have forfeited their voting rights, and duplicate registrations. Illinois and Missouri election officials in the St. Louis area have been working together to prevent voter fraud after discovering that 10 people had voted in both states in the 2004 general election.

Kentucky's attorney general and secretary of state battled in court this year over the latter's effort to purge 8,000 voters from the rolls because they were also registered in Tennessee or South Carolina. The attorney general argued that the action would disenfranchise some eligible Kentucky voters. Both sides claimed victory when a state judge ruled on October 2 that voters can be purged if they don't show up and prove their residency in this election or the next.

According to Tova Wang, a fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York City-based think tank, some states have become too aggressive in culling their voter rolls. As a result, some people who should be eligible to vote will discover on Election Day that their names have been purged. The accuracy of the state lists, she added, varies dramatically. Some states try to verify a voter's residence by checking the name against motor vehicle records. Such checks can be particularly unreliable if they depend on strict matches that don't account for typos or the fact that, surprisingly, some voters share a name and a birth date, Wang said.

Four states -- Alabama, Maine, New Jersey, and New York -- are so far behind in creating statewide databases that the Justice Department has sued them. Justice sparked a partisan firestorm in Alabama because control of the database -- and the power to purge names from it -- was given to the Republican governor, not the Democratic secretary of state. Even though fraud-hunting Republicans led the push for statewide voter rolls, one national Republican Party official recently told National Journal, "It's a sound system in theory, but in practice it has multiple bugs and is nowhere near ready to be declared a success."

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