Moore, the director of the documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” said 1,200 professional and amateur videographers would descend on polling stations in Florida and Ohio, the two battleground states that have been the focus of the most serious allegations. The last few months have seen an unprecedented drive to register new voters, especially in black neighborhoods of Florida and throughout Ohio. But the new registrations could be deemed invalid as a result of errors made on the forms, from corner cutting by workers paid to sign people up or from deliberate fraud.

In Milwaukee, in the swing state of Wisconsin, Republicans produced a list of 37,000 voters whose addresses they said were questionable. They argued that all voters should be required to show identification at the polls Tuesday; otherwise they would instruct thousands of poll workers to challenge people.

But Milwaukee’s city attorney, who represents no party, said hundreds of addresses on the list had already been confirmed as valid. Still, local Democrats warned that voters could be disenfranchised simply for failing to include their apartment number as part of their street address. Meanwhile, continuing chaos seemed inevitable in Broward County, Fla. — home of the notorious “pregnant chads” of the 2000 election — where thousands of voters are likely to end up without a vote after their absentee ballots went missing. Some replacement ballots were sent last week by courier, but 2,500 were mailed only this past weekend — by regular mail.

Legally, if the voter lives in the United States, the ballots must arrive back at Broward County, whether by hand or by post, by 7 p.m. Tuesday. The U.S. Postal Service told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel it was “really asking a lot” to expect the ballots to reach voters in time. “There’s nothing we can do about those,” countered Brenda Snipes, Broward’s election supervisor. “Those were last-minute requests that just came in this week.”

More widespread problems could result from a nationwide shortage of at least half a million election workers, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission said Sunday. It has asked businesses to give volunteers a day off work so that they can help operate polling stations and count votes. “If the criminal justice system didn’t have access to jurors, the criminal justice system wouldn’t exist. Poll workers are just as important as jurors,” said DeForest Soaries Jr., the commission’s chairman.

Around the country, scattered reports of suspicious campaigning activities continued to surface. In North Carolina, Republican Party officials distanced themselves from a Washington-based group, the College Republican National Committee, which was reported to have been targeting elderly people with confusing fundraising calls, prompting several to give money without knowing how much, or to whom, they had donated.

Across the border in South Carolina, the Democratic Party said a letter was circulating that wrongly informed voters that they could be arrested at the polls if they had outstanding parking tickets or child-support payments.

At least, that’s probably how it happened: Most of the information in the paragraph above comes — albeit double-checked — originally from sources reached through Internet search engines. Emtage couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but his invention gave birth to an idea that would come to change, at a fundamental level, the way we think. Its most feverish point was reached Tuesday, when Bill Gates officially launched MSN Search, Microsoft’s long-awaited rival to Google, the Web site that has become a sort of outboard brain for millions of people in the information age.

Google and its rivals no longer just point us in the direction of useful Web sites. They help us navigate through online dictionaries and telephone directories, scholarly journals and image libraries; one Google service launched this month allows clip-by-clip searching of American television news broadcasts. The company has announced plans to digitize a million books from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, along with many millions more from Harvard, Stanford and the New York Public Library.

Enter “time in Beijing” into the AskJeeves.com search engine and it will tell you the actual time in Beijing; put “John-Stevens New-Mexico” into Google and it will give you the phone numbers and home addresses of four people by that name in that state.

“It becomes an extension of my mind, an extension of my taste, my sensibility, my active memory,” says Sherry Turkle, a philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. We no longer need to remember, yet nor can we ever truly forget, because everything’s out there, logged and stored. It’s not so much that knowledge is power. Dominating the market in the tools people use to navigate that knowledge — which is what Gates wants to do now — is the true source of power. Own that, and is it too much of an overstatement to say that you own a little piece of people’s brains?

In truth, Microsoft has been incredibly late in coming to the game. A recent survey, conducted before the full launch of MSN Search, showed that the site that 66 percent of Microsoft employees were using to do their searching was …. The California-based company, founded in 1998 by the Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, revolutionized the concept of searching. Its system relies on the wisdom of crowds — the belief that the more people link to a page, the more authoritative it becomes.

At a stroke, searching was democratized. There was no need for people to sit at desks, categorizing pages according to their subject matter; the classification of information on the Internet became a self-supporting, organic structure. The power to find things on the Internet was in the hands of the people, not the programmers. (MSN Search appears to follow a similar logic.)

Google also happened upon an ingenious source of revenue for its ever-expanding operations. As Web users became increasingly exhausted by louder and louder and more and more annoying advertising, Google introduced low-key advertising on its results pages, matched to the words being searched for. The ads get their value not by bludgeoning users around the head, but by being precisely targeted to their specific interests — an advertiser’s demographic dream. Competition is heating up: A9, the search facility attached to the Web site of bookseller Amazon.com, allows visitors to search the text and footnotes of books — real books, made of paper — before committing to purchasing them.

But do we really want all this new information? “The end result of a perfect search world is that as fast as answers are generated and consumed, new questions come quicker, with the consequence that ignorance expands,” Internet guru Kevin Kelly writes in an e-mail. “What we know we don’t know expands faster than what we know. This has been true for a while and will only continue. Science, in fact, will come to be measured as the expansion of our ignorance, rather than an expansion of our knowledge.”

Turkle, meanwhile, says she has noticed subtle transformations in the ways some of her students think and order their ideas. “There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled,” she says, “and there is this associative glut. But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link.”

Besides, she adds, something seems to be missing. She is organizing a forthcoming trip to Bangkok, Thailand, with her daughter and recently pulled up search results promising 50,000 sites related to her area of interest, where before she would clip cuttings from magazines and keep them in files. “But there’s a superficiality, a sameness. I get 50,000 sites, but the one I cut out from a magazine came from somewhere quirky, or it was something one of my friends had sent me.”

And then there’s the question of accuracy. In fields where tracking down a completely correct fact is the very point of the job, people still regard search engines as very far from direct access points to the truth. David Elias, a professional verifier of answers for television quizzes, says he tends to mistrust the Web — “There’s so much rubbish out there.”

“The rule is that you have to have two independent sources saying the same thing,” says Katie Purnell, who researched questions for the quiz show “Grand Slam.” “We would very rarely go with a question if we could only find the answers by searching the Internet. There’s still something about the Encyclopedia Britannica” (although the Encyclopedia Britannica is, naturally, online).

But there is no sign of any diminution of our appetite for what aficionados now know simply by the noun “search.” Over the past year, the battle between the search engines has intensified dramatically, and last year AOL and Yahoo launched their own search technologies. Google continues to be the market leader, and now commands around 42 percent of all Internet searches — a commanding, but far from unassailable, position. Enormous sums are involved: The company’s flotation, last fall, raised more than $1 billion on the opening day, and its price now stands at almost $200 a share. It is all a very long way from just a few years ago, when what you put on the Web was what mattered, not how you helped people find it.

With the market consolidated among a handful of strong players, the biggest threat to Google and MSN Search will be from nontraditional companies that choose to do something daring: abandon Google’s page-ranking model. Sites with names like Orase and Technorati are offering a new phenomenon, real-time searching, which catches events and Web pages as they are put on the Internet, instead of sending “spiders” through the Web to index them afterward. Meanwhile, a variety of new tools promise to seamlessly integrate searching for data on the Web with searching for data on our own computers. It need not stop there: If Internet telephone calls become as ubiquitous as e-mail, why shouldn’t we search through archives of our every conversation? Every new development is a new opportunity to deliver value to the user (and, not coincidentally, to advertise to them even more effectively). If search engines really do function as artificial memories, they are memories that are set to become ever larger and ever more rapidly updated.

But will being able to access more information really help us do the things we want to do? Eric Davies, a library scientist at Loughborough University, has seen it all: long rows of card index files, followed by proprietary computer-search systems installed in libraries, and now the Internet. “Fundamentally the important point remains the same,” he says. “Before you go anywhere near a keyboard or a catalog, you have to define the subject you’re after. These are disciplines we need to recover,” he adds, with only the faintest trace of exasperation, “and instill in people who just have the Google mentality.”

You can’t fight technology, Turkle says, but you can influence the way it changes your life. “I can’t ask my students to pretend they don’t live in this century,” she says. “But you have to put the technology in its place.”

“We’re seeing from the exit polls that conservative Christian voters turned out in record numbers … so we certainly will be pressing for action on key items of our agenda, and we will not be shy about claiming that our influence was significant in the outcome of the election.”

In a post-election memo obtained by the New York Times, Richard Viguerie, a right-wing direct-mailing campaigner, issued a warning to the Republican Party. “Make no mistake — conservative Christians and ‘values voters’ won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress,” he wrote.

“It’s crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this — as much as some will try … Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party, are urging the president to ‘unite’ the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years.”

Morality turned out to be a key motivator in an election apparently dominated by the Iraq war, terrorism and the economy. According to exit polls, 20 percent of voters put moral issues at the top of their list — more than any other issue — and 80 percent of them were Bush supporters.

“George Bush speaks our language of faith, and John Kerry doesn’t,” said Carrie Earll, a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, an influential conservative group. “Right now, we live in a time when the economy, Iraq and the war on terror are big topics — so the fact that social and moral values took precedence over those, even in wartime, is an indication that this is fundamental to who we are as a people.”

A decisive energizing factor appears to have been measures banning same-sex marriage, which passed in all 11 states where they were on the ballot. Campaigners in Ohio claimed to have registered tens of thousands of new voters intent on supporting a ban, implying that voting for Bush might have been almost an afterthought for some.

“That certainly galvanized the church,” said Earll. “The fact that there was a presidential election was just another factor. People would have gone to the polls to vote on the marriage amendment whoever was on the ballot for president.”

With several Supreme Court justices likely to retire, the victory also leaves anti-abortion campaigners more hopeful than ever that the complexion of the court could be shifted to eradicate the current tenuous majority in support of Roe vs. Wade, which reaffirms abortion as a constitutionally protected right. Holding open that possibility was a central part of the Bush campaign’s effort to energize its Christian conservative base and reach the millions of evangelicals who stayed home on Election Day in 2000.

But a leading moderate Republican told the Guardian yesterday the tactic could prove self-destructive if pushed further. “If Bush deliberately or inadvertently appoints enough judges to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the worst-case scenario is that it’s the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,” said Jennifer Blei Stockman, co-chair of the Republican Majority for Choice. “It wouldn’t be long before the outrage would spill into the voting booth, and it would only be a matter of time before the Democratic Party ascends to power that will last for a long time.”

In pandering to evangelical conservatives, Stockman said, Republican strategists had “been feeding a monster who now has the party by its tail.” At least 75 percent of Bush voters do not consider themselves evangelicals, she said. “The keynote speakers at the Republican Convention were all ‘pro-choice’ moderates, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Rudy Giuliani to [New York Gov.] George Pataki. Was that just a masquerade or was something of substance communicated?”

Conservative Republicans argue that talk of an imminent reversal of Roe vs. Wade is fearmongering, though they are far from reticent themselves in using lurid and shocking campaign messages.

“On the immediate front, let’s ban partial-birth abortion,” said Earll, referring to the late-termination practice to which Bush has declared himself opposed. “Right now, we have a Supreme Court that says it’s a constitutional right to stab a nearly born infant in the back of the head and suck its brains out.”

American views on abortion, however, may be less sharply divided than the vocal campaigners for each side make out, said Corwin Smidt, a professor of Christianity and politics at Calvin College in Michigan. “The percentage of Americans who want total free choice has been going down, but there has been no real increase in the percentage of people who want to eliminate all abortion,” he said.

To put it bluntly, an inspirational election in Florida would be a best-case scenario.

Bekebeke belongs to one of two delegations of international observers who were taking up their positions across America’s swing states Monday to monitor the vote for evidence of long-rumored dirty tricks: harassment of voters at the polls, illegitimate challenges to people’s voter registrations and ballot fraud. “Normally we say that the kids learn from the adults, but sometimes it’s those wise adults who can learn from the kids,” said Bekebeke, fresh from monitoring the Rwandan election last year. “That’s the spirit in which I’m here in America.”

Just over 100 foreign observers, mainly from Europe, are focusing their efforts on Florida, Ohio and a few other states in the face of increasingly fractious disputes, primarily over Republican plans to challenge the eligibility of newly registered voters.

The Bush campaign appeared to have suffered a defeat on that score Monday when two Ohio judges ruled that activists would not be allowed to challenge voters inside polling stations.

One of the two cases was brought by a black couple in Cincinnati who argued that the Republican plan was designed to suppress the African-American vote — a viewpoint echoed by Jesse Jackson, who called it “Old South politics.” Republicans called the decision “erroneous” and lodged an appeal. [Update: Early Tuesday a federal appeals court reversed the two lower courts' decisions, a blow to Democrats.]

The international monitors will not intervene should they witness harassment. “We do not interfere. That’s a very important principle,” said Urdur Gunnarsdottir, a spokeswoman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is sponsoring most of the observers. “What we will do is to issue a preliminary report on Thursday.”

There have been certain tensions between the monitors and their host nation: Authorities in Miami-Dade County, scene of much of the recount drama in 2000, have refused to allow monitors to go within 50 feet of polling stations. Then there is the culture clash: the Greek OSCE delegation dispatched to Fort Lauderdale reportedly refused to stay in nonsmoking hotel rooms there.

But xenophobic hostility from voters themselves has been entirely absent, insisted Owen Thomas, a British monitor and chief executive of the election management firm Electoral Reform Services, brought to the U.S., like Bekebeke, by the human rights group Global Exchange. “It’s quite the opposite — they see us at the early voting sites and actively want to talk to us,” said Thomas, who was struck by the patience and persistence of Florida voters. “They have to queue for hours,” he said. “In the U.K. there’d be a riot.”

So far, the Global Exchange monitors said, they had witnessed no improprieties. But the true test comes Tuesday. The fact that early voting sites have not been the scene of tense registration challenges between voters and party workers does not necessarily mean the election will be clean. It may be because there are so few sites open prior to the day itself: Their catchment areas are too big for activists to coordinate the information they need to challenge people successfully.

The U.S. Justice Department is dispatching more than 1,000 of its own observers around the country, including to Long Island, N.Y., as a result of a surge in Hispanic registrations there.

The U.S. “suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack … and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander in chief, fighting a global threat against America,” Carter said. “He’s repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don’t know if it’s dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We’ll soon know.”

Carter, 80, was president from 1977 to 1981, but did not win reelection amid the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran. By comparison, support for Bush’s Iraq invasion is widespread, something Carter attributes to a transformation in America’s national mood. “When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president changes overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander in chief,” he said. “And it’s just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush’s fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions.”

He blames Bush and Blair for helping to fuel the depth of anti-American feeling in the Islamic world. Denying any link between his handling of the Iranian crisis and the present threat, Carter said: “The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, [there is] massive Islamic condemnation of the United States.”

American media organizations, he added, “have been cowed, because they didn’t want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it’s hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved.”

On nuclear proliferation, the issue that Democratic contender John Kerry has identified as the single most serious threat to national security, Carter attacked Bush for abandoning “all of those long, tedious negotiations” carried out by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and himself.

In recent weeks Carter has also warned of the possibility of a new election fiasco in Florida.

The two presidential candidates spent the weekend focusing their resources and words even more tightly on the small number of swing states considered crucial to the election on Nov. 2. Bush told supporters in Florida that “despite ongoing violence, Iraq has an interim government. It’s building up its own security forces. We’re headed toward elections in January. You see, we’re safer; America is safer with Afghanistan and Iraq on the road to democracy. We can be proud that 50 million citizens of those countries now live as free men and women.”

Carter’s interview marks the U.K. publication of his book “The Hornet’s Nest,” a story of the American Revolutionary War and the first novel to be published by a former president. Ironically, he notes, those fighting for U.S. independence could never have triumphed were it not for an alliance with the French.

James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery.

Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: She wouldn’t have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn’t been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot. But the elections office makes no such calls.

“It’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ here now,” sighed Ion Sancho, elections supervisor for Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, Florida’s capital. “Up is down, and down is up … My feeling is that someone has essentially conned her into believing that she’s going to be voting.”

Sancho is a long-standing thorn in the side of Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, who presides from a building across the street. But even he seems astonished by the reports reaching his office these days. “I’ve been an elections supervisor for 16 years now, and nobody has ever called me with this kind of activity occurring,” he said.

The mysterious calls are only the most vivid symptoms of broader problems in Florida that critics fear could leave thousands of citizens disenfranchised on Nov. 2. The new electronic voting machines have proved error-prone, and may not be capable of accurate recounts. State authorities are threatening to withhold votes from people who forget to tick a box confirming that they are U.S. citizens, even though they signed a statement to that effect on the same form. And among several legal feuds, Florida Democrats are accusing the state of failing properly to implement measures designed to prevent a repeat of the 2000 fiasco, when thousands of African-Americans were wrongly prevented from voting.

The U.S. election officially began in Florida Monday as early voting sites opened across the state — though in Duval County, a Republican-run area with a large African-American population, that too is a subject of dispute. Only one early voting site, far from densely populated neighborhoods, has been made available for the entire county. “One location for a county of 831 acres — that’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard,” said the Rev. William Bolden, a Jacksonville pastor who is among many to detect a pattern in the controversies.

Though voters have been affected across the spectrum of race and politics — Sasser, for one, is white and a Republican — they will have the effect, Democrats say, of limiting turnout among minorities, the poor and less educated voters, all of whom traditionally vote Democratic. They have been registered in record numbers this year, so the stakes are higher than ever. “Certainly, somebody is afraid,” Bolden said.

Florida faded from international headlines after the dramas of 2000, but on the broad, tree-lined streets of the state capital, things have rarely been more fraught. Katherine Harris, the elected Republican secretary of state widely seen as a key fighter in the effort to make sure George W. Bush won the 2000 recount process, is gone. But in her place is Glenda Hood, a former Republican officeholder who, thanks to a change in state law, was not elected but appointed directly by Gov. Bush, the president’s brother.

Hood has found herself embroiled in a sequence of rows. First, there was the attempt to undertake a new purge of alleged ex-felons from Florida’s voter lists — the same practice that left up to 22,000 people, mainly African-Americans, wrongly denied a vote in 2000. That was discontinued after it was revealed that the new list contained 22,000 blacks and only 61 Hispanics, who traditionally vote Republican in Florida.

Now Hood’s office is instructing county officials to reject registration forms from thousands of Floridians who did not check a box answering “yes” to the question “Are you a U.S. citizen?” — even though, in signing the form, applicants agree with the statement “I do solemnly swear … [that] I am a U.S. citizen.”

Hood is also fighting a courtroom battle over Florida’s new system of provisional ballots, introduced after the 2000 fiasco so that people who arrived at the polls to discover they were not on the register could vote anyway, then have their case considered by officials. Hood has decreed that the facility will not be available to anybody who turns up at the wrong precinct within their county.

“But in most cases, the errors in the precinct information are made by the elections office, not by the voter,” said Jerry Traynham, a lawyer who is fighting Hood on a number of cases. “Everything they’re doing seems to be designed to exclude people from the democratic process, rather than including them.”

Traynham’s other major case involves the touch-screen voting machines on which almost a third of Americans will be voting the week after next. Hood had originally sought to have the machines excluded from any manual recounts — a decision overturned in court — but now her critics argue that the machines leave an insufficient audit trail: No individual paper receipt is produced when a citizen votes.

“They certified technology in Florida which probably can’t actually do a real recount,” Traynham said. “The real danger is that if something goes wrong, you’ll never know.”

In earlier primary elections in Florida in 2002, according to a recent Vanity Fair investigation, one precinct using the machines recorded no votes, several others had their voter records wiped out, 24 polling places opened late, and dozens of poll workers resigned.

Hood has consistently denied allegations of bias, suggesting that the 11th hour nature of the lawsuits shows they are motivated by partisanship. “It is ridiculous to suggest that Secretary Hood is doing anything other than reaching out to all voters in the state,” her spokeswoman, Alia Faraj, told the Tampa Tribune. “Our goal is to get as many people as possible to participate in the process.”

Sancho seems exasperated by it all — though he insists that, in Leon County at least, he will do all he can to make sure all who are legally entitled to vote are actually able to do so. “What I learned in 2000 was that Florida is not committed to ensuring that all citizens have equal access to voting,” he said. “I saw how this movie went the first time. I don’t want to watch it a second time.”