Her more recent exploits include directing county supervisors to throw out registration forms where applicants have signed a statement

Her more recent exploits include directing county supervisors to throw out registration forms where applicants have signed a statement declaring they are US citizens but have forgotten to check a citizenry box elsewhere on the form This, too, is seen as a vote-suppressing mechanism. It, too, is now in the courts.Secretary Hood has also been waging a months-long campaign to ban what limited manual recounts the electronic voting machines permit. But they stood their ground, ensuring that anti-social behaviour orders were placed on gang’s ringleaders.”If we can’t get witnesses to come to court then we can’t impose justice on the area,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Constitutional Affairs said yesterday.In a statement released by Downing Street, Mr Blair said: “The powers to tackle anti-social behaviour are starting to make a difference, but there is more we need to do for the law-abiding citizens.”Lord Falconer said: “We must do all we can to give people the confidence to tackle anti-social behaviour in their communities. I’m not prepared to see law-abiding citizens intimidated.”Though ministers see anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) as a vital weapon in the campaign against yob culture, others have criticised their use by local councils.Rod Morgan, who took over as head of the Youth Justice Board in April this year, told the Independent on Sunday that they had played a worrying role in increasing the number of young people in custody.”What we mustn’t do is use them as a short-cut to get kids into custody – in the sense that a very large number of conditions are attached to Asbos so that we, in effect, are setting up youngsters to fail. This too was struck down in court because it was deemed likely to suppress votes – especially among transient students and low-income workers. But Secretary Blackwell has continued to implement the policy in defiance of the court order, prompting a harsh rebuke from the judge.In Florida, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has been repeatedly accused of doing the political bidding of the man who appointed her – Governor Jeb Bush, the President’s brother.

Since then, however, he has tried to insist that all voter registration forms be submitted on 80lb stock paper – a ruling struck down by the courts after he was accused of blatantly attempting to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.He has also tried to make life harder for provisional voters, saying their ballots will be recognised only if they show up at exactly the right precinct. In at least two instances now under criminal investigation, company employees have been accused of processing the applications of declared Republican voters while throwing the forms marked Democrat into the nearest rubbish bin. Sproul, which has received more than $600,000 (£330,000) from the Republican National Committee, has denied ever endorsing such practices. Still, the discarded voter registration forms have been paraded on television for all to see.In Ohio and Florida, it is the Republican secretaries of state – who oversee elections – who have been accused of putting partisan preference above their solemn civic duties.

Little wonder, then, if many are predicting some sort of collapse on 2 November. “Only a miracle, it strikes me, can prevent this election from descending into post-election chaos,” John Dean, the Watergate-era White House counsel who knows a thing or two about electoral dirty tricks, wrote last week.What has been striking is the sheer nastiness of the fight. Both major parties have vowed to do whatever it takes to win, and each has accused the other of engaging in out-and-out cheating.The whole country – never mind the woefully inadequate electoral system – is now living on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Ohio’s Ken Blackwell won points from voting rights activists earlier in the year when he chose not to go ahead with a massive state-wide buy of electronic voting machines. In Oregon, Pennsylvania and Nevada – all swing states – a Republican political consulting group called Sproul & Associates has been accused of passing itself off as a non-partisan or even a Democratic civic organisation to collect voter registration applications outside libraries and supermarkets. Campaigns have never been dirtier, or more intensely fought or more expensive.

It was the high stakes of the White House, not the messy accumulation of hanging, dimpled and pregnant chads, that sparked the crisis. And we know the stakes are infinitely higher this time, in what has been called the most important US election in memory.There has been nothing to match the current passions in American politics since the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War. The blithe incompetence of local election officials and their wonky machinery were side-effects of these battles, not the cause.In 2000, much of the agony of Florida could in fact have been avoided if the parties had agreed to a state-wide manual recount – as happened in an equally close, but amicably resolved, Senate race in Washington state that year. Fix the machines, the thinking went, and everything else will be fine. What should have been glaringly obvious in 2000, and is even more glaringly obvious now, is that the failures of the electoral process were a direct result of the ferocity of broader political battles. First, the new generation of computer touchscreen machines – brought in at dizzying speed and at even more dizzying cost to replace the discredited old punch-cards – turned out to be poorly programmed, unverifiable, prone to all manner of failure and susceptible to undetectable foul play.Secondly, the Bush administration dragged its feet about enacting funding its own new election laws.