If you don't have enough to worry about with the financial meltdown, which has panicked Bush Administration figures into the most expensive bailout in U.S. history, you could consider the various warning signs about a potential electoral meltdown in November.

Mary Pat Flaherty has a useful roundup in the Washington Post today of the most obvious problems with rapidly changing voting systems encountering record numbers of new voters.

The bottom line, of course, is that we persist in allowing a highly decentralized, crazy-quilt system of electoral rules, procedures and "safeguards" dictated at the state and sometimes county levels of government. It was in 2000, and remains today, a recipe for disaster.