10 choke points for Election Day

5. Vote-flipping and other glitches
If you're lucky, the early-voting season has already wrung out the glitches in the voting machines. Some jurisdictions, however, use different systems on Election Day, and there's always the chance that bad calibration on a touchscreen voting machine will allocate your vote to the wrong candidate (a phenomenon known as "vote-flipping").

Some states are required to have emergency paper ballots on hand in case too many of the touchscreens go on the blink, or in case the lines get too long. (The battleground states of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio are prime examples.)

6. Long ballots, long lines
Technical glitches aren't the only reasons for delays at the voting booth. "We're hearing that lengthy ballots are making polling times longer," said Kay Stimson, communications director for the National Association of Secretaries of State. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, have been basing their allocation of voting machines on the assumption that it will take three minutes to vote — when the actual times might run closer to six minutes.

In 2004, there were scattered reports of pollworkers pressuring voters who took too long, but Stimson said she wasn't aware of such problems this year. To streamline your own polling-place experience, Stimson and many other election observers say you should study a sample ballot in advance and bring it to the polling place as a guide.

7. Party hot spots
If history is any guide, each political party will try to focus its legal firepower on precincts where it stands to gain the most — or where the other party stands to lose the most. Judges and election officials are usually caught in the middle. Will polling-place hours be extended, as they were for early voting in Florida? Which states, and which counties within states, will be in play for the election endgame?

"The 'fog of war' is the right way to explain Election Day, as seen by the county election office," Jones said. "It's a battlefield."

8. Counting the ballots
You might think the early votes and absentee ballots would be beyond dispute, but that's not necessarily the case. Such votes could be excluded due to mismatched signatures, or irregularities in the way the ballot was marked, or failure to sign the outside envelope for a mail-in ballot.

Jones said 4 to 10 percent of optical-scan absentee ballots typically "end up having to be examined by eyeball directly to get the voter intent correctly." Because so many more of such ballots are being cast this year — not only in the traditional absentee scenarios, but also in mail-in and early-voting settings — they could offer a bigger target for legal challenges.

9. Post-election ordeals
More and more states are conducting post-election audits to check the accuracy of their voting systems. In some states, touchscreen machines have been modified to print out a paper record of each vote. That's aimed at addressing concerns about disappearing e-votes. But what if the audit suggests a result that's different from the electronically recorded vote? Are the computers at fault, or the printers?

Even paper-based systems have their problems. The classic example played out in Palm Beach County, Fla., where thousands of optical-scan ballots went lost and found after an August primary election. It took several weeks' worth of recounts before officials settled on the winner of a razor-close judicial contest. If things turn out just wrong, something similar to 2000's Bush vs. Gore ordeal could happen again this year — even though Florida's infamous butterfly ballots are long gone.

10. Letting go
If the presidential election isn't all that close, none of these potential choke points will matter. But if the margin is as narrow as it was in 2000 or 2004, it might be up to the candidates themselves to decide how far they want to keep the uncertainty going. Democratic candidate Al Gore took his dispute all the way up to the Supreme Court in 2000. In contrast, Gore's successor as the Democrats' standard bearer, John Kerry, decided against appealing the Election Night verdict in 2004.

This year, if the vote is close, the final act of one of America's most gripping campaign dramas may be determined not by the winner, but by the loser.

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