In Florida, allegations surfaced that several thousand votes were mistakenly cast for Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan rather than Democratic candidate Al Gore because the ballots were poorly designed. With the outcome of the presidential race hanging on a recount of Florida's vote, such snafus threaten to become ammunition in legal warfare between the parties. Election lawyer Bill Canfield says the confusion and lines on Tuesday were inevitable results of old systems. "Until every precinct in America goes to a computer format, you are going to have that problem," he says. Yet some of the more modern alternatives, including mail-in voting and Internet voting, this year revealed their own problems. The upshot is that glitches could be regular features of Election Day for some time to come. The problems arise in large measure from the decentralised system by which America conducts its elections. Congress and state governments have taken a series of steps designed to make the process easier and more fairin recent years. They have introduced "motor voter" registration, for example, to automatically register voters when they renew their drivers licenses, and have extended polling hours to adjust to irregular work schedules.

The US Constitution delegates the duty of conducting elections to the states, leaving the federal government no direct role. In practice, state governments have left it to the country's thousands of counties and municipalities to administer elections. These local governments choose their own voting technology and generally supply the funds to staff polling centres. And while they usually undertake the task conscientiously, counties and cities are among the poorest units of government in the US. Many can't afford modern systems.

The most modern of them, known as "direct recording electronic," uses computerised machines to electronically store voters' choices. But that system was used by just 7.7% of the electorate in 1996, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Three of the other systems more commonly used are almost laughably archaic. Mechanical-lever machines, first introduced in Lockport, New York, in 1892, are still used by about one-fifth of the electorate, though no company produces them any longer. In New York alone, 19,533 of these lever machines are rolled into polling stations each election. The machines range in age from 25 to 50 years old, says Tom Wilkey, executive director of the New York Board of Elections.

Shoup Voting Machines in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, made the lever machines used in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and several counties in Tennessee.

Owner Ransom Shoup says the company stopped producing them in 1978 and last made replacement parts in 1988. He says that the machines have a "life expectancy of 100 years," and that he didn't receive any complaint calls from New York officials on Wednesday.

Paper ballots, still used by about 1.7% of voters, were first adopted in the Australian state of Victoria in 1856 and were introduced in the US by New York in 1889.

The most common method is the punch card, in which voters poke holes that are then tallied manually or by a computer. Punch-card technology originally was developed for the 1890 census; it's similar to the process later used by the original International Business Machines computers. The cards are still used by about 37% of voters, even though the computer industry abandoned this method for storing data decades ago with the invention of disk drives.

One problem with punch cards: Many people fill them out incorrectly, either casting their vote for the wrong person or invalidating their ballot altogether. That is what happened in a hotly contested 1988 Senate contest in Florida, and Democrats believe it cost them the election.

And that is what Democrats now say happened with punch-card ballots in Palm Beach, Florida, last Tuesday. They assert that the cards were so clumsily constructed that many elderly voters who thought they were voting for Mr Gore punched out the hole that cast their vote for Mr Buchanan.

The problems in Palm Beach appear to have resulted from an effort to make the ballot easier to read for senior citizens, the very voters who later complained that they were confused. Officials had enlarged the print, which caused the one-page list names to spill over onto a second page, says Palm Beach attorney Lois Frankel, who works closely with the local election office.

"They deliberately did it that way because of our senior citizens," says Ms Frankel, a Democratic state representative. "They wanted to have the writing big. If they did it small it would have been on one page." Thus, the names of some candidates faced those of others on an opposing page, with punch marks in the middle, which made it hard to tell which marks went with which candidates.

Of the remaining systems in use, optical scanning, which uses lasers to read printed or hand-marked symbols on ballots, is the most common, covering about a quarter of voters. That technology, to, has some flaws and is costly.

The upshot is that, while high-tech systems are making some inroads, the old-fashioned counting tools won't disappear anytime soon. Mr Wilkey, of the New York elections board, insists his machines "have been well-maintained and are in ship-shape." Similarly, Thomas Griffen, who sets up lever machines for elections in Michigan, says: "There's not much that goes wrong with them."

Still, voters in New York City logged hundreds of complaints about their voting experience this week, many of them citing broken machines.

"I wanted to vote for Nader, and I couldn't move the lever," says Keith Gemerek of Brooklyn, New York, who voted at a school. "After several tries, I got it. I just banged my hand in the process." He adds that the lever for his state senator was broken, so he couldn't vote in that race.

Parag Khandhar, a policy associate at the Asian American Federation in New York, says that when he went to vote at another school in Brooklyn, three levers were broken in each of the voting booths. As a result, he couldn't vote for state senator, state assembly, and a judgeship. The polling site had also run out of envelopes for paper ballots that it had been distributing because of the broken levers, he says.

"My right to vote was taken away from me," the 26-year-old says. "The machines are so old, they have to do something about it."