We deserve better.

As a country, as a democracy, voting is vital both practically and symbolically.

If the final days of this divisive election season come and go as they have begun, both the practical and symbolic are being undermined.

In 2000, more than 105 million people – about 51 percent of registered voters – turned out on Election Day. Even under the best of circumstances, there are going to be mistakes, human beings are involved, after all. To put it in perspective, even if votes were correctly cast and counted 99.99 percent of the time, there would still be more than 10,000 spoiled ballots. That’s more than the margin of victory last time around in states such as Florida, New Mexico, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon and Wisconsin.

The error rate is likely much higher than just 0.01 percent, and there’s more going on than good-intentioned mistakes.

Registration drives have added millions of new voters to rolls this year. Some communities in Maine have seen registration of new voters increase fivefold, and registration is allowed here even on Election Day.

There is tension – breaking down along partisan lines – between the desire to eliminate voter fraud and the desire to increase participation and access to voting.

Trouble is already brewing.

In Ohio, a swing state with a big Electoral College prize, the courts have been involved over Republican efforts to purge 35,000 newly registered voters from the rolls. In Florida, 58,000 absentee ballots weren’t delivered to voters who requested them, and the state has had to scramble to replace them.

Democrats and Republicans are fielding armies of lawyers to work the polls, planning to challenge and defend voters.

It’s been four years since the Supreme Court decided the presidency in Bush v. Gore. But the problems that were discovered then have not been fixed. Congress failed with its Help America Vote Act, when there was a chance to create national voting standards. That law allows for provisional ballots for people who believe they have been incorrectly disenfranchised, but fails to set any clear standards on how those ballots are to be counted or judged.

Congress could have eased the tension left over from the contentious 2000 election. More confusion has been created instead.

Our fear is that the election between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry will be very close, and the irregularities inherent in voting – and efforts by partisans to stack the deck in their favor – will leave the election in doubt, eroding both the symbolic and practical role of voters. The country can ill-afford another election decided by the Supreme Court.

A huge turnout can overcome fraud, disenfranchisement and error. That’s what we’re hoping for.