America/Conor O'Clery: 'Hogwash, hogwash," cried Jeb Bush. "This is all part of some politically motivated thing that tries to scare people to somehow think their vote is not going to count."
What got the Florida Governor so agitated was an announcement by Pax Christi USA, the Catholic peace movement, that, mindful of what happened in 2000, it intends to bring international observers to four counties in Florida to monitor the presidential elections in November.
Furious that his state was being treated like a developing-world country, the President's brother protested that Florida's elections laws have become today "models for the rest of the nation".
Florida has eliminated the old punch-card system that introduced the world to such things as pregnant chads.
Fifteen counties, including Palm Beach, home of the butterfly ballots, have installed ATM-like machines with electronic touch-screens, and the other 52 counties now have optical ballot-paper scanners.
The electronic machines are easy to use, multilingual and wheelchair-friendly and don't allow anyone to vote for more than one candidate, as happened in 2000.
But the risk of another Florida fiasco - or of tampering with the ballot - remains high. The machines have no paper back-up, making it impossible to do a recount. Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state and top election official, refuses to have paper back-up, citing time and money problems.
There are already ominous signs of trouble. In 2002 Miami-Dade County machines were shut down improperly, delaying a count. One precinct with 1,000 voters recorded an unbelievable zero votes. In a local Republican election in January, won by 12 votes, a machine recorded 134 blank ballots among 10,000 voters.
Dozens of voters in Palm Beach County who used the new machines during the state's Democratic primary a week ago were given computer cards that did not include the candidates' names.
Faith in the reliability of the machines will be crucial if the count in November comes down to a few hundred votes, as happened four years ago.
George Bush won Florida's 25 electoral votes by a mere 537 majority after the US Supreme Court stopped a recount in a 5-4 decision. This allowed Mr Bush to gain the White House by five electoral votes.
Democratic Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton are trying to make it illegal not to have a paper trail, and Congressman Robert Wexler from Boca Raton wants a federal court to find the electronic machines unconstitutional.
The problem does not just apply to Florida. In Georgia, the first state to install electronic voting machines, Democrats have voiced suspicions about the outcome of the 2002 Senate race when Democrat Max Cleland, who was five points ahead two days before the election, was defeated by seven points.
The Georgia Diebold machines used can be accessed with a "supervisor smart card", according to Bev Harris in her recent book, Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century.
Everyone had the same password, she found out. Anyone with a card could theoretically adjust the vote count.
The road to the White House again runs through Florida this year. Karl Rove, the President's political adviser, calls the state "Ground Zero" of the coming election. With 9.3 million voters, Florida is the largest state not "assigned" to either party and provides 10 per cent of the electoral vote needed to select a president.
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 42-38. But Republicans run the state. They control the two houses of the legislature, and Jeb Bush won re-election as governor in 2002 by 56 per cent of the vote. The Republicans are disciplined and well organised. They plan to have up to 50,000 paid and volunteer organisers on the ground by November to get out the vote and enable Jeb Bush to once again deliver the state to his brother.
George Bush has already made 19 visits to Florida as President, the most recent when he went to Daytona Beach to start the big Nascar stock-car race (whose conservative working-class fans are known as "Nascar Dads") with the words: "Gentlemen, start your engines."
A Miami Herald/St Petersburg Times poll last week showed Kerry leading Bush by 49-43 in Florida with 5 per cent undecided, and 3 per cent for independent Ralph Nader. In 2000 Nader, then a Green candidate, took 2 per cent of the ballot, amounting to 100,000 votes, which Democrats blame for the defeat of Al Gore.
In a state where one in five of the residents are over 65, Kerry is strong on issues like Medicare, Social Security and healthcare. The big defence industry in Florida and the large Jewish population favour Bush, as Kerry had proposed defence cuts and vacillated over the Israel wall.
No Florida community is more important to the Republicans than the Cuban-Americans who form 13 per cent of the state's voters. In 2000 Bush got an estimated quarter-million more votes from Cuban Americans than Al Gore, giving rise to the saying that Cubans are able to elect a president in the US but not in Cuba.
Jeb Bush, a fluent Spanish speaker, is very popular with the Cuban-Americans. But the overwhelming (81 per cent) support they gave to George Bush in 2000 came from a community furious at the Clinton administration over its forced repatriation of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba.
It is likely to be less this time. The current policy of turning back people fleeing from Cuba may also have diminished the ardour for President Bush. As the New Yorker notes, a popular salsa song in Miami - about the failed attempt by Cuban refugees to reach Key West in a Chevrolet with pontoons attached - contains the line "George Bush has become a rat".
Campaigning in south Florida, Kerry said he would "look at alternatives" to sending back refugees to a "Stalinist, dictatorial state".