The 2000 presidential election, especially as it was conducted in Florida, shone a huge spotlight on one of the most troubling aspects of our democracy: how hard it actually is to ensure that eligible voters have the right to participate in elections, and have their votes accurately counted.

The month-long post-election saga in Florida mainly focused on disputes about how votes are tabulated. It drew enormous attention to wide variations, within and across the states, to the rules for ballot design, voting machines, vote challenges, disqualified ballots, absentee voting, and of course, recounts. That, too, was the main focus of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which provided new federal resources to ensure competent administration, updated technology, and greater uniformity of rules for the state and local officials who actually conduct elections in our country.

But Florida 2000 also illustrated a variety of abuses, some probably unintentional, and others almost surely deliberate, aimed at keeping voters -- especially minority voters -- from casting ballots in the first place. Lost in all the furor over hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and hand recounts were many examples of pre-election abuses that probably had a greater impact on the election's outcome than all the post-election disputes combined:

• Last-minute changes in polling places
• Selectively applied "purges" of voter rolls that disqualified eligible voters
• Poorly updated votes lists that did not include recently registered voters
• Inaccurate lists of felons barred from voting under state laws
• Organized harassment and intimidation of voters through inaccurate information on qualifications and false threats of "voter fraud" sanctions
• Wholesale, unfounded challenges to minority voters at the polls

This last category has provided an especially rich vein of dirty tricks in elections all over the country in recent years. In several jurisdictions in 2002, mysterious flyers appeared in low-income neighborhoods just prior to election day telling voters they would be disqualified or even arrested if they were in arrears on utility bills, parking tickets, or child support payments. Qualified Hispanic voters were sometimes told they had to produce evidence of citizenship in order to vote, and shadowy operatives posing as INS or FBI agents appeared near polling places in some areas with large immigrant populations.

The League of Women Voters and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights recently published a list of the "top five risks to eligible voters in 2004." They include:

• Failure to process voter registrations -- especially those conducted by drivers license agencies under the "motor voter" laws -- before election day.
• Erroneous purges of voter lists close to election day
• Discriminatory administration of ID requirements
• Failure to educate voters on the use of new machines
• Failure to count the "provisional ballots" -- votes cast by those whose eligibility is in question -- required by HAVA

Perhaps the most ambitious effort to identify and stop these abuses before November, and police high-risk polling places on election day itself, has been launched by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a non-partisan group first founded at the request of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to support and help implement landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation. Aside from going to court to address flaws in state and local voting systems and registration laws well before the elections, the Lawyers' Committee is recruiting and training thousands of lawyers to voluntarily serve as poll watchers and voter educators on November 2.

This strikes us as an excellent use for America's abundant -- some would say surplus -- legal talent. In a country where voter participation is persistently lower than in virtually every other developed democracy, it's a scandal that any eligible voter wanting to cast a ballot should be discouraged or arbitrarily disqualified, due either to the incompetence of voting officials or the malice of partisans. Given the strong possibility that this year's presidential contest will be another squeaker, election protection has become an important national priority. One presidential election conducted and decided under a cloud of fraud and dirty tricks is enough.