Another Contested Contest?

It seems increasingly likely that even under ideal circumstances -- one man wins the presidency, the other gracefully concedes and the anchors sign off in time for ''Seinfeld'' reruns -- roughly half the country will emerge from Tuesday's election suspecting that it was stolen. And nothing about this particular campaign has been ideal. No matter which man, George W. Bush or John Kerry, gets the nod from the networks on election night, we have already been warned to expect angry recrimination, demands for recounts and litigation filed by some of the hundreds of lawyers who will spend Tuesday on call, ready to jet off to battle in counties they never knew existed. Republicans and Democrats alike have already put the nation on notice that they will not accept anything short of a resounding defeat as the final word in this election, which suggests that the legal tangle of 2000 was not the aberration that many of us assumed it was but, rather, a redefinition of the presidential campaign itself. Just as candidates have in recent years found ways to kick off their campaigns in stages so they can garner more attention (first the exploratory committee, then the campaign committee, then the official announcement), so too are they now poised to shut down those campaigns just as gradually, beginning with the voting itself and ending with the Supreme Court's rejection of one last, desperate brief.

We don't yet know which state capital might play host to the lawyers, strategists and celebrity protesters after the votes are in, but we have some idea of what the fight this time might be about. In the rush to address the country's electoral confusion after the 2000 debacle, Congress -- try to contain your surprise here -- appears instead to have made it worse. Federal law now requires states to offer ''provisional ballots'' to voters whose names don't show up on the precinct rolls; in other words, you're allowed to cast a ballot while officials decide whether or not your vote should be allowed to count. But lawmakers left it up to the states to decide how and whether to accept them, and Democrats are already suing authorities in several states, including Ohio and Florida, over the way in which provisional ballots are to be counted. Meanwhile, some highly contested states, in a frenzied effort to purge themselves of the dreaded chad, have switched to electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail at all. That means it will be literally impossible to conduct a recount to verify the results.

Having signed up something like a million new voters between them, both parties -- and especially Democrats, since their registration efforts account for most of those names -- have voiced concerns that their voters won't make it onto the rolls in time for Election Day. In the last few weeks, state and national party spokesmen have bombarded journalists with e-mail messages accusing one or another obscure state or county official of fraud and deception. Gone are those innocent days when the Daleys and Kennedys tried to steal elections after the votes were cast; campaign lawyers, like cold-war theorists, have successfully adapted to the age of pre-emption.

The dispute in every contested state is different, depending on the law and which party is in charge. (Should Ralph Nader be allowed on the ballot? Should everyone be sent absentee-ballot request forms, or just those who ask for them? What about military ballots that come in after the deadline?) But the basic contours of the argument are the same throughout the country, and it is an argument infused -- like just about every argument in American politics -- with race and culture. Democrats, who rely disproportionately on the elderly and on often less educated minority voters, charge that Republicans discriminate against those voters by trying to throw out every registration form that isn't filled out perfectly, with each ''x'' in its correct box, and by inventing reasons to turn away disadvantaged voters when they get to the polls. It is a suspicion that resonates most strongly with black voters in largely white counties, who compare today's county election officials to the segregationist police chiefs of an earlier era. The Washington Post recently reported that new black voters in Duval County, Fla., a heavily Republican area that was the focus of protests over disenfranchisement four years ago, are seeing their registrations challenged at a far higher rate than white voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, cry fraud, charging that what Democrats really want to do is create a kind of self-serving mayhem at the polls, enabling urban voters to vote in multiple precincts or without having to establish their identities. To be fair, this is not, historically speaking, an entirely unreasonable fear; the legendary Democratic machines of the 20th century, in cities like Boston and Chicago, were so notorious for their creativity with the registration rolls that the long dead became an influential voting bloc. Even so, it's remarkable to see the extraordinary contortions to which some Republicans -- those self-declared champions of leaner government and less restriction -- will now routinely submit themselves in an effort to stop people from registering to vote. Take, for example, J. Kenneth Blackwell, the secretary of state in Ohio, who, in his rare devotion to arcane provisions of the legal code, recently instructed counties to throw out any application that was not submitted on suitably thick bond paper. (He relented after sensible county officials vowed to defy the order.)

The most obvious way to prevent such nonsense and resolve these technical disputes in the long term might be to take the system out of the hands of politicians. Bruce Ackerman, a liberal professor at Yale Law School and one of the nation's few imaginative thinkers on election reform, has proposed replacing the Federal Election Commission, an anemic board of part-time political appointees, with a more powerful panel of retired judges modeled after the Supreme Court. This body would function as nothing less than a fourth branch of government, insulating the process from the interference of partisans. A plan like this might not, by itself, prevent further calamity -- after all, even the Supreme Court, rather than lending an imprimatur of dispassion to the 2000 proceedings, instead found itself compromised by the outcome -- but it might help restore a sense of impartiality to the system.

And yet to concentrate our energy on examining the flaws in the process itself is to miss the larger context of the voting controversy. After all, for all its imperfections, American democracy still functions remarkably well; that we can send millions of voters to schools and town halls, each with their own balloting system, all on the same day, and achieve results in hundreds of races in time for the next day's newspapers is, when you stop and think about it, a wondrous thing. What we are experiencing here is not so much a failure of law or technology as it is a crisis of trust.

Before 2000, most American voters generally viewed the political process in much the same way that avid fans view baseball. Yes, the umpire will blow a call now and then, and the manager will kick some dirt around, and he may even lodge a formal protest that has exactly zero chance of succeeding. But baseball fans come to see most of these incidents as isolated quirks. There is an underlying faith that the umpire is an honest broker and that his inability to gauge fractions of a difference (the milliseconds, say, between the time a ball hits a glove and a foot hits a base) is entirely human. Without this faith -- if the umpire, say, wore a Yankee cap in Fenway Park -- the game would devolve into pandemonium over every close strike. This is very much like what's happening in states across the country as Democratic partisans vow to prevent a repeat of the last election. The voting process, once presumed to be a reliable, if fallible, arbiter of the public will, is increasingly seen, even by many more sophisticated voters, as a tainted instrument of partisan conspiracy.

This is not happening in a vacuum, however, nor is it all a direct result of butterfly ballots and recounts; it is, rather, a symptom of the moment. No longer content to accept that the process might not give us the results we prefer, we have taken to impeaching the integrity of everything associated with the process itself. Partisans now attack reporters for being too timid to expose the lies and hidden designs of their adversaries. A rumor that the president somehow cheated in the televised debates -- was that a wire under his jacket? was he listening to Karl Rove on a microscopic earpiece? -- flies across the Internet and takes hold in dark corners of the public imagination. The idea that reporters or strategists or candidates might be well-intentioned actors of sharply differing views, that their allegiance to the idea of the democratic process might outweigh their allegiance to parties, seems a quaint notion from another world, a classical ideal with no place in American democracy. We are a nation of political conspiracists, trusting no one to do the right thing. A sticker I recently spotted on a Washington subway hints at the kind of politics we may be approaching. It said: ''Bush Caused 9/11.''

Not since the dawn of the civil rights movement, if not before, has American politics felt so divisive, and there is plenty of blame to divvy up for this state of affairs. Politicians themselves, having spent the last few decades debasing the institutions of democracy, are the most obvious culprits. Democrats, for example, have never missed an opportunity to tell poor and minority voters that the system was trying to exclude and marginalize them; Republicans have been equally fervent in telling white voters that nothing the federal government does ever benefits them. Is it any wonder, then, that neither side trusts in the integrity of elections? The media have played their role, too, by trading short-term measures of success -- ratings, ad space -- for the long-term trust of their audience. So have political consultants, for whom polarization has long been a means to an end.

But more to the point, perhaps, this continuing erosion of public faith represents the abject failure among leaders of both parties to salve the wounds of the 2000 election. Having once campaigned as ''a uniter, not a divider,'' Bush has rejected historic opportunities -- first after he finally took office, then after the 2001 terrorist attacks -- to acknowledge that one party could not afford to govern without the other. And Democrats in Congress, who vowed to respect the presidency, if not the president himself, have done nothing to repudiate the deeply personal attacks launched by the Michael Moores of the world, which galvanize their financial donors. Both the president and his critics, in the context of the Arab world, like to talk about the triumph of democratic values, what Bush likes to call ''the transformational power of liberty.'' That we now stand at the brink of what could be another contested election, another damaging descent into fury and self-righteousness, attests to how little they have done to reaffirm those beliefs at home.

Matt Bai, a contributing writer, is covering the presidential campaign for The New York Times Magazine.