With just hours to go before American voters head to the polls, it has all but officially been declared that the 2004 presidential election will be the most chaotic and contentious in recent memory.

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Thousands of attorneys, representing the Democrats and Republicans as well as non-partisan groups, are expected to flood polling sites, hoping to ensure that things go according to plan.

For many incredulous observers, both in America and abroad, this election is shaping up to be nothing less than 'Florida 2000, the Sequel'.

"It's not only Florida. Numerous states seem almost incomprehensibly ill-prepared for November 2," said Anita Raman, a New York attorney who flew down to Florida on Saturday.
 
In Ohio, a swing state, Republicans have enlisted 4,000 people to patrol polling stations on the election day -- particularly in heavily urban areas -- and contest voters they suspect to be ineligible to vote.

Democrats, who have enlisted about half that number, have charged the Republicans with attempting to prevent minorities and the poor from voting. In two cases, federal judges have ruled that anyone representing political parties would be prevented from challenging voters at the polls. Republicans have vowed to appeal.

Separately in Ohio, a federal judge blocked Republican efforts to remove tens of thousands of voters from voting rolls.

One group, South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow, plans to send its own people to polling booths with large numbers of South Asian voters and conduct exit interviews.

"Last election, we heard of some issues that had occurred in Michigan, and in New York," said Nick Rathod, an attorney and chairman of the board of directors of SAALT. "In Michigan, there was a local election. The election officials dispatched the police to the site, where the South Asian voters were going. Each South Asian voter was interrogated; they were primarily racially profiled and targeted and asked questions about who they were voting for."

Rathod also pointed to a new legislation, Help America Vote Act, a response to what occurred in Florida in 2000. "A particular concern is that they require first-time voters to provide identification, but they haven't defined what that identification should be," he said. "We're afraid that South Asian voters may be asked to provide citizenship papers or naturalisation documents, which is normally considered illegal. That could be a problem."

That could generate fear within the community, he said, particularly with first-time immigrant voters.

According to Margaret Fung of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, which is coordinating the efforts of SAALT and other Asian groups, voter intimidation is far more common than people like to believe.

"There's some sense this only happened in the south and in the 1960s, but it happens in California, in New York, where they say if you're not a citizen and you vote that's a felony and Immigration will be here. If there's a sense that there will be a roundup, you may not want to show up on election day."

Aside from voter intimidation issues, problems with voting machines are bringing attorneys to heavily-contended states such as Ohio. For Rupa Singh, a San Diego attorney who flew to Ohio a few days before the election, there are many ways in which the system is open to error.

"The way it's being done now is the software hasn't been tested, there are documented problems that haven't been addressed, and some of the polling machines were purchased a few weeks before the election," said Singh, one of a number of attorneys working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "How are you going to train poll workers in that time?"

With electronic systems, she noted that a paper trail would be extremely beneficial as a guarantee against fraud, but the only state with such a system is Nevada. Elsewhere, only time will tell how things will go.

"I don't want to overemphasise problems," she said. "The vendors are going to have technicians there. If there's a power outage or a ballot fails to activate, I believe they are trying to make vendors available at the polling sites. But what happens if they shut down the polling sites. Are people going to be able to have the polling place stay open later?"