US: Conor O'Clery went out of his way to assist the democratic process in West Palm Beach.
A bespectacled, middle-aged woman is standing distraught beside her automobile when I return to my hired Chevrolet in a West Palm Beach car park late on Friday afternoon. She has driven it onto a bank's private space and now there is a large orange clamp on the front left wheel and no one around to remove it.
"I don't know what to do," she says, introducing herself as Judith. "I have to collect my mother's absentee ballot today before five o'clock, and this is the last day. Can you drive me there?" Her mother, she tells me as we set out on the ten-mile journey to the county administrative headquarters, is 100 years old. Judith lives in New York State, and has come to Florida where her mother lives to help her vote and to work as a campaign volunteer.
She promises that when she gets to the polling site, she will nip inside the building, where early voting and distribution of absentee ballots is going on, and I can drive her straight back.
As we drive up to the concrete and brick building, dozens of activists wave Kerry and Bush posters at us. And then to her horror (and mine) we see that a queue of voters and people collecting absentee ballots stretches from the glass doors back around the building and almost out of sight among the palm trees in the grounds.
There is a two-and-a-half hour wait, says the security guard at the door. Only a few voters are being admitted at a time to use the Sequoia touch-screen voting machines inside.
These were installed since the fiasco in Palm Beach in 2000, when some 19,000 'over-votes', most of them clearly intended for Al Gore, were rejected because voters got confused with the butterfly ballot, and hundreds of mainly elderly Jews accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan instead of the Democratic candidate.
Both parties have groups of lawyers hanging about, many from out of state, identified by little stickers on their shirts, ready to challenge anyone who seems to be voting or getting ballots outside the letter of the law.
This sometimes causes delays but the mood of the voters is remarkably patient, and, one might say, grimly determined. Both Republican and Democratic supporters in Palm Beach County are determined to do their democratic duty and make sure the other side gets whacked.
Passions have been running high in Florida's most contested counties, leading to some arrests. An 18-year-old marine in West Palm Beach beat his girlfriend after she said she was going to vote for John Kerry. At Vero Beach, a 52-year-old Republican was charged with aiming a gun at the head of a Kerry supporter.
And in Sarasota, a 46-year-old driver aimed his Cadillac at Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and swerved away at the last minute: he was just exercising his "political expression" he told police, and giving a "little scare" to the woman whom Democrats blame for the mess four years ago which led to the state going to George W Bush.
The potential for another crisis in this election count certainly exists in Palm Beach County.
The touch-screen machines have no paper back-up so that a recount of electronic votes cannot be held if there is a close result.
That's why over 125,000 of the county's 735,000 registered voters requested absentee ballots that will be read by optical scan machines.
But some don't even trust this process - wisely, as several ballots went missing in the post - and have arranged for absentee ballots to be collected by hand.
Judith walks straight to the top of the queue of voters, talks her way in with a little New York effrontery, and emerges triumphant with her mother's absentee ballot paper about half an hour later.
In the car she shows me the ballot paper, expressing indignation at its complexity. It looks like a company balance sheet, with choices for several party offices.
On the left is the list of presidential candidates. Arrows with incomplete shafts point to their names. You vote by drawing a line to make a complete arrow.
I leave Judith back to her car in West Palm Beach, where she finds a security guard and talks him into removing the clamp without a fine. For the record she is a Democrat, as is her 100-year-old mother.
If President Bush loses the election by one vote in Palm Beach County, I will have to take full responsibility.