With county budgets for elections often given a low priority, local election officials often lack money to buy modern voting equipment, hire enough polling-place workers and handle increasingly complex ballots.

The Electronic Transmission Service operated in 2000 and 2002, and in earlier elections, but Ms. Williams says Omega did not handle ballots in those years.

Voting machine manufacturers and their employees, and companies that handle ballots, should not endorse or contribute to political candidates.

I think the more you handle ballots, the worse it is.

When the people handling ballots know who they are cast for, it is not hard to imagine that ballots for disfavored candidates could accidentally be "lost."

The Defense Department should stop handling actual ballots, and instead help military and other overseas voters send them directly to local elections officials.

The county canvassing boards were forced to pull together ad hoc teams comprised of judges from various circuits who had no previous training in handling and interpreting ballots.

The letter said that whatever system for handling military ballots the state devised, it should make sure that it did not serve to "disenfranchise military personnel."

For nearly 90 minutes, Mr. Dole glowered at the board members as they handled disputed ballots.

Time said that these rulings brought uniformity in handling provisional ballots to the counties that did not previously exist.