When South Africans go to the polls tomorrow in the first general election since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, they will do so in the shadow of two ominous predictions.
One, expressed by the immediate past chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), Judge Johann Kriegler, is the "spectre of tens of thousands of black youths arriving at voting stations on election day and demanding to exercise their democratic right to vote" only to be turned away.
If Judge Kriegler - who resigned in protest at alleged attempts by government departments to undermine the IEC's autonomy - is right, the chances of an explosion of anger by the disappointed would-be voters are high.
The events leading to Judge Kriegler's warning can be stated briefly. The government decided that only people with bar-coded identity cards could register to vote.
Judge Kriegler, after commissioning a survey by the Human Science Research Council (HSRC), feared that the task of issuing these documents to the millions of South Africans without them would prove to be beyond the capacity of the Department of Home Affairs to fulfil.
Hence the spectre of angry young people, especially in the more remote, black-dominated rural areas, descending on polling booths demanding to vote.
Judge Kriegler's warning, issued in January, has since been reiterated in modified form by Dr Johann Olivier, of the HSRC.
Investigation by Dr Olivier's research teams since Judge Kriegler's resignation shows that nearly half of roughly five million potentially eligible voters who did not register as voters still plan to vote tomorrow.
The IEC, now under a new chairwoman, Ms Brigilla Bam, is confident that the election will go off smoothly.
So, too, is the Department of Home Affairs, though its director-general, Mr Albert Mokoena, has been suspended after press disclosures that he was managing a professional basketball team and abusing his position to obtain South African identity documents for players who were foreigners.
Tomorrow will establish whether the fears of Judge Kriegler and Dr Olivier were justified or, alternatively, whether the IEC and Home Affairs were right to reassure the public that the fears were groundless.
As the propaganda machines ground to a halt last night - electioneering is forbidden from midnight last night - two controversies continued to simmer in the minds of voters.
One relates to a call by the Democratic Party leader, Mr Tony Leon, for a summit of opposition parties after the election to examine the possibility of a realignment of these parties into a more cohesive force. His initiative has been interpreted as a move to form an anti-ANC front.
Mr Leon, who espouses "muscular liberalism", already has been accused of sacrificing liberal principles in order to gain the votes of Afrikaners disillusioned with the inability of the New National Party - as the old NP as renamed itself - to stand up to the ANC.
Mr Pallo Jordan, one the ANC's foremost intellectuals and a formidable debater, is on record of accusing Mr Leon of "dragging liberalism through the muck of racism", an accusation which the Democratic Party adamantly repudiates.
The second controversy relates to reports that the ANC received millions of rands from the controversial Libyan leader, Col Gadafy, for its election campaign.
The outgoing South African President, Mr Nelson Mandela, has forged close ties with Col Gadafy, who recently chastised South African Muslim organisations who called for a boycott of the pending election and urged Muslims to vote for the ANC.
The ANC has long been accused of using its control of the state to solicit foreign funding for its election campaign, a practice which, opposition parties contend, is an abuse of power which compromises South Africa's sovereignty.
Closely related to that grievance is another: the belief that the ANC has used its dominance in parliament to restrict the flow of funds from state coffers to parties which are already represented there and, as a corollary, to ensure that it is the major beneficiary (it receives roughly R30 million of the R50 million available).
The most vociferous criticism of the above practice emanates from small but militant black-dominated parties which are contesting the national elections for the first time, having boycotted the 1994 elections because they believed the negotiations between the ANC and the former ruling party, the NP, were a sham.