No hanging chads. No votes evaporating in electronic ether. Just color an oval or fill in a line.

The optical scanners voters will use Nov. 4 have been roundly praised as simpler and more trustworthy than the punch cards and touchscreens they replaced. A schoolkid could figure them out, and they leave a ''paper trail'' that can verify computer-tabulated results.

But this is Florida. Paper trails, recounts and audits only go so far. And, all too frequently, Palm Beach happens.

The county behind the infamous butterfly ballot of 2000 temporarily misplaced 3,500 ballots in a tight judicial race during the August primary. It took four weeks and three recounts, each producing slightly varying numbers, to declare a winner. But the loser's lawsuit means the recounting may not be done yet.

''I think Murphy's Law has taken up residence in the Palm Beach County elections office,'' said Mary McCarty, a Republican county commissioner and canvassing board member. ``It's a different system but the curse remains.''

One month before a presidential race expected to draw a strong turnout, the question is whether Palm Beach's problems reflect one county's inability to exorcise the demons of Bush-Gore 2000 or portend wider troubles for McCain-Obama 2008.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning dismisses fears of another major meltdown, as do elections supervisors in Miami-Dade and Broward. They expect inevitable isolated problems but doubt the glitches will rival Palm Beach's dubious record.

For Browning, the state's top elections official, things like software bugs, malfunctioning machines and partisan hackers aren't the primary concerns. ''As long as people are involved in this process,'' he said, ``it's going to be an imperfect system.''

While some experts predict long lines on Nov. 4, it's really the days after that voter advocates and elections supervisors in South Florida worry most about -- particularly if the presidential race requires a recount.

That's largely because when lawmakers last year adopted optical scanners -- a technology that reads a voter's mark on a paper ballot -- they left in place a recount process critics contend is rushed and restrictive.

Despite controversies over computer-generated results, machines still will do almost all the recounting in narrow races.

''We have the paper trail, but it's a paper trail to nowhere,'' said Dan McCrea, president of the Florida Voters Coalition, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Manual recounts, triggered when machine tallies show races decided by less than a quarter of 1 percent, are limited to the tip of the paper trail -- ballots that machines reject for too many marks, too few marks or marks scanners can't decipher. Only lawsuits might open the full trail to hands-on review.

12-DAY DEADLINE

Lawmakers also retained a 12-day deadline for counties to certify votes, which McCrea called among the tightest deadlines in the country. New York, by comparison, allows 25 days. For hand recounts, elections supervisors have just three days to examine what could be -- at least for large counties such as Miami-Dade and Broward -- tens of thousands of questionable ballots.

''The state's deadlines for certification are inappropriate and unrealistic,'' said Lester Sola, Miami-Dade's elections supervisor. ``They really have not changed significantly since the punch card system.''

There are also questions about post-vote audits. Florida is among just 18 states requiring manual recounts to check the accuracy of machines -- but the only one that conducts them after declaring winners. And those audits randomly select one race and 2 percent of precincts, a low threshold critics say could fail to detect miscounts in other races.

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