"We see these kinds of issues whenever an election is close," Judith Browne Dianis, a civil-rights attorney and co-director of the Advancement Project, told reporters at a briefing this week. "Whenever the margin is smaller, we see the ramping up of these kinds of tricks."

The most worrisome prospect, for these advocates, is the Tea Party-linked group, True the Vote, that has vowed to send a million citizen observers to the polls on Election Day. In the past, the group's observers have been deployed to predominantly minority areas, armed with spurious challenges to voter eligibility. Progressives fret that the mere presence of "white guys in suits with clipboards" looming over every voter is enough to scare people whose interactions with authority haven't always been positive -- kind of like those voter fraud billboards, which, while accurate, prompted calls to radio stations about whether you could be thrown in jail for voting with unpaid parking tickets.

Like so many features of modern American elections, the Advancement Project's vigilance today stems from the awful memory of Florida in 2000, said Penda Hair, another co-director of the group. The chads, the butterfly ballots, the thousands of alleged felons wrongly purged from voter rolls: None of it surfaced until it was too late to do anything about it. "We wanted to make sure we could stop this from happening before the election," Hair said. "Somebody should have been watching in 1998 and 1999 when this purge was being hatched."

A decade past the Florida nightmare and 2004's "voter caging" schemes, in which GOP poll monitors challenged tens of thousands of Ohio voters with little basis, advocates are far more proactive about anything that could be construed as discouraging people -- particularly minorities -- from voting. The Advancement Project was a party to the lawsuit that stopped Pennsylvania's voter ID law and will be working with a coalition of "election protection" groups to monitor the polls in targeted areas of nine states on Election Day. (None will receive more attention, of course, than Florida.)

Some of the group's alarm sheds valuable light on genuinely sneaky stuff that might otherwise pass under the radar; some of it is a bit over-the-top, seeing a conspiracy in every long line at a polling place, every ballot that takes a long time to get through. (Some Florida ballots this year are clocking in at 12 pages or more thanks to ballot initiatives, and reading them is contributing to those long lines.) Another tactic highlighted by the Advancement Project: A right-wing group is sending people letters detailing the voting history of their neighbors. It's creepy, but it's not suppression -- as Sasha Issenberg describes in his book The Victory Lab, this is a shaming tactic, pioneered by Democratic operatives, that's been proven to increase voter turnout.