By Juan Castro Olivera
Haunted by the debacle of the 2000 White House race, Florida is rolling out a new voting system this year amid lingering fears that if the results are close again in this pivotal state they may be disputed.
The swing state of Florida brings a rich reward of electoral votes for the candidate who wins a majority on November 4 - all the more reason for both parties and election monitoring groups to focus on the state which introduced the world to the "hanging chad" in 2000.
The Supreme Court in December 2000 handed the presidency to George W Bush after uncertain results and multiple recounts of confusing paper ballots gave him a victory of little more than 500 votes over Democrat Al Gore.
In the latest state electoral system reform overseen by Republican Governor Charlie Crist, optical readers print out the choices voters have entered on computers.
The machines then use optical scanners to read the paper ballots, which are retained for verification purposes in case of any problems.
"Florida is regarded as a leader in election reform due to the challenges we have faced, and we are looking forward to election day 2008," Jennifer Krell Davis of the Florida Department of State told AFP.
Since 2000, Florida has "instituted uniform ballot design, voter intent and voting system laws and rules. Because of those uniform rules and laws, Florida has a much more organised and stable elections process," she said.
"As of 2006, Florida has a statewide voter registration database, when in years prior, each county had their own database. Because the entire state is operating with one database, our quality of data and elimination of duplicate registration has improved dramatically."
In 2000, a patchwork of county voting systems, unclearly marked ballots, defective voting machines and incorrect voter rolls were blamed for thousands of votes being lost.
But the problem was not fixed for national legislative elections in 2006, when the state used electronic voting machines that involved no paper trail at all.
Some 18,000 votes were feared lost in Sarasota, on Florida's Gulf Coast, because the machines registered them as abstentions and there was no way to verify them.
"I'm not going to anticipate a problem. I'm just going to prepare for a problem by making sure that we've got lawyers in precincts all across the state," Democrat Barack Obama said during a recent campaign stop in Florida.
The campaign has employed far more monitors in Florida to observe election procedures than his Republican rival John McCain, who seems to be less worried about what might be in store for him in the state under a Republican governor.
For Susan Pynchon, executive director of the Florida Fair Election Coalition, Florida's voting problems are far from resolved, and the results are far from guaranteed to be fair.
"Governor Charlie Crist said they didn't want to be embarrassed in another election, but instead of fixing the problem they tried to make laws to cover up the problem," she said.
She has no doubt that if Florida once again plays a key role in deciding a close election, there will be problems, citing for example that there would be no manual recounts, as machines would have to be used to re-scan the ballots.
The huge number of new voters registered in Florida, most of them Democrats, could encounter problems due to delays in processing their information, she warned.
Parties sometimes send letters to voters' homes and if the letters are returned, require them to complete an additional procedure to confirm their data, without which they may not vote.
"There are many different dirty tricks" put into play in a hard-fought campaign, Pynchon said.
Only three states carry more electoral votes than Florida. Whoever wins the state reaps 27 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House.