Tommy Denton

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For those Virginians who voted absentee for Tuesday's election, here's hoping their ballots get counted.

The same goes for those who arrive at the polling places, find their names missing from the registration list or forget their identification card and submit a provisional ballot.

Such concerns don't even begin to take into account nervousness about an accurate vote tally related to the new, potentially hackable electronic touch-screen machines that have aroused anxiety, not only among conspiracy theorists but also ordinary advocates of democratic integrity.

For instance, less than two weeks before the election, local officials in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville reported that portions of the electronic ballots displayed on their machines were cutting off parts of candidates' names and parts of the proposed constitutional amendments.

Local officials insist that the malfunction will not cause votes to be miscast. Don't worry. Trust the machines.

Just to make sure everyone can breathe a sigh of relief, though, the Virginia State Board of Elections has assured the public that the agency would demand that the manufacturer, Hart InterCivic of Texas, correct the glitches -- in time for the 2007 general election.

Trust at the voting booth has been on shaky ground ever since the unpleasantness in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, particularly in Florida that year and in Ohio and New Mexico in 2004. Curious events have been happening then and since, and not simply because whiz-bang machines malfunctioned, confused voters and failed to provide accountability for ballot integrity.

A whole range of "dirty tricks" has been exposed, suggesting demographic targeting so as to suppress voter turnout, usually in ZIP codes where ethnic minorities or pockets of economically disadvantaged populations reside.

Just as "get-out-the-vote" programs toward the end of a campaign target preferred voters to urge them to the polls, the old tactic of discouraging turnout has taken on new trappings.

Whereas the old White Citizens Councils of the South employed poll taxes and "literacy" tests, more sophisticated new models include unorthodox purges of voter lists, posting of armed guards at select polling places as a subtle gesture of intimidation, and announcements by local election officials that they would not count provisional ballots of voters who had registered by legal deadlines with other state agencies but whose applications failed to arrive at the registrar's office in time.

Such techniques were cited by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia recently in its petition to the U.S. Justice Department to place monitors at polling places in Chesterfield County, where a pattern of just those abuses suggest a "hostile" official attitude toward minority voters.

In his book "Armed Madhouse," Greg Palast documented examples of local officials finding technical reasons -- "illegible" signature, questionable postmark, etc. -- to discard both absentee and provisional ballots during the 2004 election.

Palast reported that 3,107,490 voters nationwide in 2004 were required to vote on provisional ballots, of which 1,090,729 were rejected. For absentee ballots, based on official reports for the same election, Palast wrote that 526,426 absentee ballots were received but not counted.

None of those illustrations necessarily proves that elections are more crooked now than in the past, but they suggest the need for healthy skepticism by all voters in this age of black box mischief and political manipulation of the election process.

Despite discouraging suspicions of chicanery, voters should be all the more determined to safeguard and exercise their democratic franchise, especially on Tuesday with the direction of the nation so alarmingly errant. But those voters also should take nothing for granted.

If voting in person on Tuesday, each voter should insist that election officials explain, fully and clearly, any aspect of the process so as to dispel doubt about casting -- and having counted -- each legitimate vote.

If voting on a provisional ballot, the voter should have the election official verify that every jot and tittle on the affidavit is valid before submitting the ballot.

If voting absentee, each voter should verify after the canvass the status of the ballot, whether counted or voided. If it was voided, demand convincing, justifiable answers.

After all, these elections don't belong to the political parties or the public officials. They belong to us.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.