TOLEDO, Ohio -

With John McCain and Barack Obama

already swapping accusations of widespread voter fraud, experts warn

that a bitter and protracted fight could ensue if the race to the White House is decided by a narrow margin.

The legal battle over election rules has already made it all the way to the Supreme Court

as Republicans fight to block potentially false registrations from

being validated and Democrats struggle to prevent voter

disenfranchisement.

Compounding the

problem is the decentralized US electoral system, which hands often

partisan local officials the power to make rules and maintain the voter registration rolls.

"I'm hoping it's not close," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor who specializes in election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

"I am certain there will be problems on election day."

An estimated nine million new voters have registered for the hotly

contested November 4 election, and the Obama campaign says Democratic

registrations are outpacing Republican ones by four to one.

The McCain campaign contends that an untold number of those

registration forms are false and warns that illegally cast ballots

could alter the results of the election and undermine the public's

faith in democracy.

Republicans have launched a slew of lawsuits aimed at preventing false

ballots from being cast, the most high-profile an attempt to challenge

as many as 200,000 of more than 600,000 new registrations submitted in

the battleground state of Ohio that was blocked by a Supreme Court ruling Friday.

They point to investigations into whether liberal-leaning community organization ACORN deliberately submitted false voter registrations as proof of "rampant" and widespread fraud which McCain said could be "destroying the fabric of democracy."

But the Obama campaign said this was just a "smokescreen" to divert

attention from Republican "plotting" to suppress legitimate votes and

to "sow confusion and harass voters and complicate the process for

millions of Americans."

Voters whose registrations have been challenged or those who find their

names have been removed from the rolls are often required to cast provisional ballots, which are not immediately counted in some jurisdictions and are often rejected due to technicalities.

Meanwhile, a 2007 study by the New York University School of Law

concluded that "it is more likely that an individual will be struck by

lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

"For these problems to be really decisive they have to be within the

margin of litigation, which is typically a few thousand votes," Hasen

said in a recent interview.

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The 2000 election took weeks to resolve as Democrat Al Gore fought Republican George W. Bush all the way to the Supreme Court after Bush won the state of Florida, and thus the election, with a margin of a few hundred votes.

Four years later, Democrat John Kerry conceded defeat despite allegations of widespread voter suppression in Ohio, which handed Bush his second term with a margin of nearly 119,000 votes.

In the meantime, electoral litigation has become part of the standard play book.

The number of lawsuits filed over elections has more than doubled from

an average of 94 in the four years prior to the 2000 election to an

average of 230 in the six years following, Hasen found in a study

published in the Stanford Law Review.

Misinformation has also been used to discourage voters from showing up on election day.

Students in Virginia, Colorado and South Carolina

were wrongfully told by voting officials that they could lose their

scholarships and their parents would no longer be able to claim them on

their income taxes if they registered to vote in their college towns.

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights

launched an advertising campaign this week to combat misleading rumors

- some started by local officials in mailings to voters - that people

would be denied the right to vote if they lost their home to

foreclosure, have a criminal record or do not have photo identification.

Such tactics are not new, said Laughlin McDonald, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's voting rights project.

Despite strict constitutional and legal protections for the

right to vote, "the history of the country has been one of flagrant

vote denial," McDonald told AFP.

Many of tactics once used to keep blacks from voting in the south - poll taxes, literacy tests, violence and intimidation - have been eliminated.

But some have been adapted, including the practice of purging

voting rolls of people likely to vote for the other party by

challenging them en masse.

"There's more (attempts at voter suppression) that's been going on in the lead-up to this election than any I can remember," McDonald told AFP.

"The fact remains the people who have the power to make the

rules are all too often willing to do so in ways that serve their

partisan interests."