Ooops. Sorry.

The election's tomorrow, and I'm finding it hard to type with my fingers crossed.

What I was trying to say was this: Make sure you vote, if you haven't already. Because there are places in this world where powerful forces will do everything they can to try to stop you.

Places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Ohio.

Recently, tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio were sent registered letters from the state Republican Party. If the targeted voters weren't home to sign a receipt when the mail carrier came — if they were working, or at school, or serving in Iraq, for example — they were left a note, telling them they would have to go down to their local post office during the work day to sign for and receive the campaign literature.

If you live in a swing state such as Ohio, you're deluged with campaign ads and pieces of campaign mail. So it's not surprising that 35,427 Ohio voters declined the chance to go down to the post office to sign for yet another pamphlet. They had better things to do, and they had no way of knowing that their refusal would become trumped-up evidence that almost cost them the right to vote.

You see, the registered mail was Step One of a sophisticated scam. Armed with a list of those who didn't pick up their registered letters, the state Republican Party initiated Step Two by filing legal challenges against their right to vote, claiming those voters either didn't exist or didn't live at those addresses.

The idea was to force all 35,000 to either appear at Board of Elections hearings to prove their right to vote, or be stricken from the rolls.

Fortunately, the whole thing collapsed at Step Three, when the challenge hearings were held. In Summit County, where more than 950 challenges were filed, the process was abandoned after the first four cases.

The voters who showed up were outraged at having to take time off from work to defend their right to vote, as they should be. And when the Republicans were asked to produce their proof that the voters were ineligible, all they had was the failure to sign for a registered letter.

To their credit, even Republican members of the election boards were appalled by what their party had done. In Summit County, in the Akron area, Republican Joseph Hutchinson made the motion to have all challenges thrown out because, as he said, "There was no evidence."

His motion was seconded by board member Alex Arshinkoff, the head of the county Republican Party, who called the process "a train wreck" plotted by the state GOP.

Later, a federal judge ordered a temporary halt to all challenge hearings in Ohio, a ruling that the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Friday.

For years, Democratic and civil rights activists have complained about Republican efforts to discourage voter turnout, particularly among minority communities. It's been hard to give those claims much credence, though, because in most cases there was little concrete proof.

In other cases, activists were clearly overreacting to the kind of innocent if aggravating problems that have dogged elections for years.

In this case, though, we've got a concerted, elaborate large-scale effort financed, organized and operated by the state Republican Party that attempted to make tens of thousands of citizens ineligible to vote based on no real evidence whatsoever. And once that sinks in, a lot of those other allegations about block-the-vote programs in Florida and elsewhere become much easier to believe.

The real danger goes even deeper, because this kind of behavior undercuts the faith in one another that makes democracy possible. That faith was already destined to be sorely tested over the next few days, in large part by allegations of fraud and abuse from both sides.

This could really be a mess, undercutting the legitimacy of whoever wins the presidency at a time in our history when such decisions ought to be as clear-cut as possible.

© 2004 Atlanta Journal Constitution

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