At the recent Pew Forum in Atlanta, there was quite a bit of discussion about Florida’s voter registration systems. The Tallahassee paper reported:

An outspoken Florida elections official Saturday predicted “mass confusion and chaos” at the polls because of errors in voter registration databases, but the state’s top elections official said Florida “is not going down the crapper” next November.

The Miami paper noted that:

[Secretary of State Browning] acknowledged, however, that at least 14,000 Floridians across the state who registered to vote in the last year may be blocked from voting in the presidential primary because they didn’t supply the correct information.

Those voters have until Dec. 31 to get their information corrected in order to be eligible to vote in the Jan. 29 presidential primary. But, Browning told reporters, that number is small — less than 1 percent — compared to the 1.5 million people who attempted to register to vote.

Ned Foley has often asked the question about whether perfection is possible in elections and how do we devise systems that address the lack of perfection. 2008 may be the year we have to figure out what our tolerance for errors in voter registration actually are.