ST. PAUL, Minn. – The campaigns of Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken wrangled Monday over hundreds of unopened absentee ballots that could still tip Minnesota’s Senate race.

Lawyers ended a testy public negotiation session convened by the secretary of state’s office without agreement on which ballots to open or how many should be under consideration.

That leaves the heavy lifting to a series of regional meetings that begin Tuesday. The ballots that make the cut at those meetings will be opened in St. Paul by Monday.

Those ballots are important because Franken leads Coleman by just 47 votes after the manual review of more than 2.9 million ballots.

The absentee ballots in question were incorrectly rejected by poll judges on or before Election Day, mostly because of clerical errors outside the four legal reasons for rejection.

The state board overseeing the recount ordered that the ballots be counted, and the state Supreme Court agreed – although justices added a few wrinkles. A majority ruled that either campaign can keep any ballot out of the mix with a written objection, leaving spurned voters the option of going to court to reinstate their ballot.

Local officials identified some 1,350 rejected ballots they now say should count, but Coleman’s campaign suggested there are an additional 650 that should be added.

A large share of the ballots already identified come from counties where Franken ran up big margins over Coleman. Minneapolis alone accounts for almost 10 percent of the ballots. Coleman’s proposed additions skew heavily toward suburban and rural counties where he did best in the election.

By this weekend, the secretary of state’s office is supposed to open the pile of ballots and add the votes to the race tally. It’s the last major obstacle before the five-member Canvassing Board declares a winner.

Monday’s negotiations were an attempt to speed the absentee counting process, which the court said must end by Jan. 4.

In seeking to reconsider more ballots than previously identified, Coleman campaign attorney Tony Trimble stressed the stakes.

“Time is precious, but accuracy is much more precious,” he said.

Franken attorney Kevin Hamilton accused the Coleman team of trying to manipulate the process for political advantage.

“If we’re going to start cherry-picking off those lists, the whole thing breaks down,” Hamilton said.

Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who ran the negotiations, said he was reluctant to ask county officials to re-examine absentee ballots they had sorted through twice already.

“The clock is ticking away,” he said at one point.

At the regional meetings, local election officials will display the sealed envelopes of the list of potentially erroneous rejections.

If both campaigns agree the ballot inside should count, it is shipped to St. Paul. A disagreement leaves it out pending possible court action. The campaign lawyers were warned they could face sanctions for baseless attempts to exclude legal votes.

RALEIGH, N.C.  – The margin of President-elect Barack Obama’s victory in North Carolina is just about finalized.

Obama received 14,192 more votes than Republican nominee John McCain after the lawful provisional ballots were added to the totals.

The Associated Press declared Obama the winner Nov. 6 after determining there weren’t enough provisional ballots to change the outcome. Obama will be the first Democrat to receive North Carolina’s electoral votes since 1976.

State elections director Gary Bartlett said Thursday the results likely won’t change before the State Board of Elections certifies election winners Tuesday.

Libertarian candidate Bob Barr received 25,722 votes – less than 1 percent of the total vote. Overall voter turnout was 69.5 percent, slightly higher than the recent record set in 1984.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Provisional ballots are doing little to change the final margin of North Carolina’s presidential race.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain gained 310 extra votes as counties tallied some 17,500 provisional ballots Friday.

But he still trails President-elect Barack Obama by some 12,804 votes.

There are still about three dozen counties who haven’t reported results. Friday was the day counties were to canvass their provisional ballots and provide numbers to the State Board of Elections.

The Associated Press declared Obama the winner last week after determining there weren’t enough provisional ballots to change the outcome. Obama did not need North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes to win the White House.

DURHAM, N.C. — Durham County’s director of elections says there are about 2,000 provisional ballots in Durham County alone.

In North Carolina, the difference between votes for president-elect Barrack Obama and Senator John McCain remains at 11,246 votes according to the State Board of Elections.

The relatively small difference in votes has caused elections officials to focus on provisional ballots, which have not been counted so far.

“Historically, the provisional ballots will be around 40,000,” said the state’s executive director Gary Bartlett.

According to Bartlett, provisional ballots come from voters who had identification problems at the precinct.

“Either their name is not on the poll books and there is some issue with ID, or [there is a] jurisdictional dispute,“ Bartlett said.

The state board’s executive director said on average, about 65 percent of provisional ballots are able to be verified and counted. Historically, those votes favor the candidate that already has the lead.

“Therefore, it should increase Obama’s lead,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett says the results from provisional ballots should be released when County elections officials canvas, or audit, their election results. Countywide canvassing is scheduled for Nov. 14.

The state board of elections conducts its own canvas of election results. That audit will take place on Nov. 25 — the same day North Carolina’s election results are officially certified.

A Florida elections official has taken the extreme measure of sleeping with his county’s ballots to ensure the integrity of the vote.

Lines stretched around buildings and crossed city blocks as people waited to cast ballots in the historic presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. Touchscreen voting machines malfunctioned in some precincts, yet voting Tuesday appeared to go smoothly overall.
 
The biggest trouble was big crowds. But folks seemed to take it in stride.

“People are happy and smiling,” Sen. Benjamin Cardin said as he voted at a Maryland school. “People are very anxious to be voting. They really think they are part of history, and they are.”

In the East, electronic machine glitches forced some New Jersey voters to cast paper ballots. In New York, eager voters started lining up before dawn, prompting erroneous reports that some precincts weren’t opening on time.

In the West, Californians also faced long lines, but voting went smoothly. In Orange County, south of Los Angeles, about 400 people were on hand to treat problems with the county’s all-electronic voting system, said Brett Rowley of the registrar’s office.

“We’ve got paper ballots as a backup,” he said.

Heavy rain plunged a handful of Los Angeles polling places into the dark, forcing some to move voting booths outside until electricity was restored. Voting didn’t stop.

Election officials predicted turnout rates as high as 80 percent in California, the country’s most populous state and the highest holder of electoral votes. In Virginia, State Board of Elections executive secretary Nancy Rodrigues said she expected 75 percent of the state’s registered voters to cast ballots by Tuesday night.
  
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell urged voters to “hang in there” as state and country officials braced for a huge turnout in that hotly contested state. More than 160 people were lined up when the polls opened at First Presbyterian Church in Allentown. “I could stay an hour and a half at the front end or three hours at the back end,” joked Ronald Marshall, a black Democrat.

Hundreds converged on polling precincts in Missouri, another crucial battleground state. Norma Storms, a 78-year-old resident of Raytown, said her driveway was filled with cars left by voters who couldn’t get into nearby parking lots.      

“I have never seen anything like this in all my born days,” she said. “I am just astounded.”

In some places the wait was longer than two hours.

“Well, I think I feel somehow strong and energized to stand here even without food and water,” said Alexandria, Va., resident Ahmed Bowling, facing a very long line. “What matters is to cast my vote.”

Some voting advocates worried that – tolerant voters or no – the nation’s myriad election systems could stagger later in the day, when people getting off work hit the polls.

“We have a system that wasn’t ready for huge turnout,” said Tova Wang of government watchdog group Common Cause. “People have to wait for hours. Some people can do that. Some people can’t. This is not the way to run a democracy.”
 
Ohio, which experienced extreme voting delays in the last hours of the 2004 election, had some jammed paper problems in Franklin County. “We’re taking care of things like that,” said elections spokesman Ben Piscitelli. “But there’s nothing major or systemic.”

Perhaps the most bizarre barrier to voting was a truck that hit a utility pole in St. Paul, Minn.’s Merriam Park neighborhood. The accident knocked power out for about 90 minutes to two polling locations. Joe Mansky, Ramsey County’s elections manager, said voting continued at those sites.
 
Election judges said the ballots were kept secure at one of the locations until the power was restored and the ballots could be run through an electronic machine, while a backup generator kicked in at the other site.

Late Monday, McCain’s campaign sued the Virginia electoral board, trying to force the state to count late-arriving military ballots from overseas. No hearing has been set.
 
McCain, the Republican candidate and a POW during the Vietnam War, asked a federal judge to order state election officials to count absentee ballots mailed from abroad that arrive as late as Nov. 14.

Lawsuits have become common fodder in election battles. The 2000 recount meltdown in Florida was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.

What is uncommon about Tuesday’s contest is the sheer number of voters expected to descend on more than 7,000 election jurisdictions across the country. Voter registration numbers are up 7.3 percent from the last presidential election.

In 2000, the presidential election was marred by hanging chads in Florida. Four years later, it was malfunctioning machines in Ohio. With record numbers of voters expected yet again, the fundamental question remains whether the country’s embattled election machinery will stand up to the pressure.
  
This year’s unprecedented primary turnout has already exposed cracks in the infrastructure. In Texas, lines stretched for hours and ballots ran out. Voters in Virginia were told to submit slips of paper – which were later disqualified – when ballot deliveries didn’t arrive, and overwhelmed poll workers in Washington, D.C., hid electronic machines because they were afraid of the contraptions.

“Right now, election officials probably identify with Sheriff Brody in ‘Jaws,’ who having seen the great white shark for the first time turns to his fellow passengers and remarks, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat,”‘ electionline.org director Doug Chapin said in a recent study of voting problems.

Primary turnout broke records across the country – in Delaware and the District of Columbia, the number of voters tripled from 2000; in Florida that figured doubled. The only state with less than 50 percent turnout was New Hampshire, which lost some of its luster as the first primary state when most of the country moved
theirs to early in the year.
 
Though nearly all election officials have taken extra precautions for Tuesday – some have ordered a paper ballot for every registered voter as well as increasing the number of electronic machines – substantial fear remains that polling places won’t be able to stand up to millions of voters who want to choose between Democrat Barack Obama, who could become the first black president in American history, and Republican John McCain.

“The ultimate test of democracy is full voter participation,” said NAACP president Ben Jealous. “States are not completely grasping what they’re in for. In Virginia, the governor won’t even agree to printing out additional paper ballots. Even though they started passing out sheets of paper during the primary because they ran out of ballots.”

Foreshadowing what could be a litigious ending to this year’s election, the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit in Virginia, demanding more electronic machines in minority neighborhoods, and extra paper ballots in case those machines are tied up by record turnout. A judge denied the request Monday following a hearing.

State Republicans had contended that changing voting procedures this late in the game could disadvantage their candidates.
 
Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, an Obama supporter, says the added precautions aren’t necessary. “We feel confident that we’ll be prepared,” said gubernatorial spokeswoman Delacey Skinner. “I think that voters who are going to the polls on election day should go early and be prepared for the line, but we’re not anticipating any kind of major problems.”

Major voting problems disrupted the 2000 presidential election when poorly punched ballots, which resulted in hanging chads, and huge turnouts ignited a volatile, weekslong recount that ended with a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2004, lines that stretched 14 hours long and malfunctioning electronic machines created havoc in Ohio, which eventually gave George W. Bush a second term by a margin of about 119,000 votes.

In the past eight years, with money appropriated by Congress, local election officials across the country have changed their voting systems – and changed them again when highly touted electronic voting machines were shown to be vulnerable to hacking and malfunctioning.

On Tuesday, nearly half the country will be casting ballots on a new system, the majority of them using paper cards read by optical scanners.
 
But it is not the machines that most worry voting advocates. It’s the number of people using them.
 
Already, early voting in states including Florida and Georgia drew crowds that waited for hours and prompted people to bring lawn chairs, and poll workers to hand out bottled water. In Colorado, more than 50 percent of registered voters cast ballots early.

“Suppose Tuesday comes and goes and there’s allegations that tens of thousands of people went to vote and were unable to cast a ballot and went home,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in voting litigation. “There’s the claim of disenfranchisement but no way to prove it. That would be extraordinarily undesirable.”

When it comes to election lawsuits, and there have been scores filed since the 2000 meltdown, the most likely litigious issue in this election is provisional ballots.

They were introduced in 2003 as part of the Help America Vote Act, a far-ranging reform of election systems and voting laws designed to avoid a repeat of Florida’s disaster. People at the polls who believe they have been wrongly denied the right to vote – people whose names don’t show up on registration lists, for example – have the right to cast provisional ballots.
 
But rules about counting those ballots sharply differ from state to state, creating confusion and prompting about 20 lawsuits in the past five years, Foley said. In several states, provisional ballots not cast in the proper precinct are thrown out.

With an unprecedented number of voters expected on Tuesday – many of them newly registered, raising the possibility that their names didn’t make it onto registration lists – Foley said the provisional ballot may be the hanging chad of 2008.

“They’re an insurance policy for voters against wrongful removal from the polls,” he said. “But it’s a ballot with a question mark on it. Most states have not created uniform rules for counting them.”

RICHMOND, Va. – Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign sued the Virginia election board Monday, claiming absentee ballots weren’t mailed on time to military members serving overseas.

The complaint asks the U.S. District Court in Richmond to order the state to count absentee ballots postmarked by Tuesday and received by Nov. 14. It contends that thousands of troops’ ballots – many of which would go to McCain – will not be counted.

The deadline for ballots to be received is 7 p.m. Election Day, which is Tuesday.

The lawsuit is the second in a week to challenge preparations for the presidential election in Virginia, where Barack Obama hopes to become the first Democrat since 1964 to win the state’s 13 electoral votes. Polls over the past week show him about even with or slightly ahead of McCain.

More than 436,000 new Virginia voters have registered since Jan. 1, and about 500,000 people – a tenth of the state’s electorate- have cast absentee ballots.

The NAACP sued the state last week, alleging it allotted too few voting machines for the enormous number of voters in majority black precincts expected to be drawn by the prospect of electing Obama as the first black president.

U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams on Monday declined to order longer voting hours and other changes requested by the NAACP. He did order the elections board to publicize the availability of curbside voting for older or disabled voters and the fact that people in line by 7 p.m. will be allowed to vote.

A hearing on McCain’s lawsuit is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Tuesday before Williams.

That lawsuit alleges that ballots for overseas military voters were mailed too late to ensure they are returned by the deadline. Defendants are the chairwoman, vice chairman and executive secretary of the state elections board.

A 1986 federal law requires ballots to be mailed to military voters in foreign countries at least 45 days before the election, which this year would have been Sept. 20. The lawsuit alleges the state didn’t have the ballots printed and sent to local officials by then, meaning they may not have been mailed overseas until October.

Ashley L. Taylor Jr., an attorney for McCain, said tens of thousands of oversees military absentee ballots could be voided unless the deadline is extended.
 
“The last thing you want is to have a service member in Afghanistan or Iraq who received his ballot too late not being able to vote in this election,” Taylor said.

Board Chairwoman Jean Cunningham said late Monday afternoon the board had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment.