David Earnhardt made a film called UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections about U.S. election fraud in 2004 and 2006. The film details all sorts of screwy vote thwarting, including software-based vote "flipping." So it was kinda funny when his own early voting was nearly thwarted by a paperless touch screen machine, this year in his home state of Tennessee. He and a poll worker could not get the light to light up. When his wife hit the touchscreen for Obama, the light lit up next to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney...

Are we ready to count every vote? Tis the season of dirty tricks. With ten days to go before the General Election and Barack Obama pulling into a double digit lead . . . could record turnout, new machines, new voting rules and high stakes -- lead to a perfect storm of confusion if not outright vote suppression on election day?

Civil rights attorney Ron Kuby (also host of Air America Radio’s Doing Time) talks about Ohio and the remarkably good precedent set there, once the Supreme Court smacked down the Republicans who were trying to disenfranchise voters over clerical errors. He suggests Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher would have had a hard time voting with his easy-to-misspell name. Pity the tricky eastern european names...

John McCain, as if preparing the ground for a complaint, has already been calling foul. To add insult to irony, Republican operative Mark Jacoby, was arrested on October 19th for voter registration fraud after registering himself to vote at two homes where he did not live. He and fellow GOP operative Nathan Sproul - paid by the McCain camp - have been accused of destroying or falsifying voter registration forms deliberately and in Sproul’s case intimidating voters.

Electoral justice activists are geared up for the challenges, Election '08 style. Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice talks about the procedural battles being fought over voter rolls; we should be fighting over issues, not blocking voters. In Ohio 200,000 new registrants whose information didn't match exactly other databases came up against typos - if your records are wrong in a state database, you may be disenfranchised.

Damon Hewitt, from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (and director of the organization’s Katrina Project) is concerned that local registrars and clerks of court are not ready -- that the infrastructure is broken. His campaign Prepared to Vote is concerned that each and every voter has access to the ballot. Plenty of states still need supervision under the Voting Rights Act. They're seeing voter intimidation in the style of old school Bull Connor, along with the unprecedented registration and enthusiasm.

The first and last piece of advice from our panel: assert your rights, and check your registration before election day. Links that can help: Election Protection's 866 Our Vote and Prepared to Vote a campaign of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund. There's state by state information on both sites. Yes! magazine has 12 Ways You Can Safeguard the Vote, and the National Association of Secretaries of State (the public officials charged with safeguarding your vote) offer Can I Vote?