President Bush and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi insisted last week that Iraq would go ahead with elections scheduled for January, despite continuing violence. But U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving those elections -- a secret "finding" written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates -- whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran -- but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections. But lawmakers from both parties raised questions about the idea when it was sent to Capitol Hill. In particular, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi "came unglued" when she learned about what a source described as a plan for "the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections." Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue.

» TIME.com: How Much U.S. Help? -- Oct. 04, 2004

    

Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet "basic international requirements" and could undermine the US election, former US President Jimmy Carter says.

He said a repeat of the irregularities of the much-disputed 2000 election - which gave President George W Bush the narrowest of wins - "seems likely".

Mr Carter, a veteran observer of polls worldwide, also accused Florida's top election official of "bias".

    

Citizens for Legitimate Government ... said that an old law requires all voter registration forms to be on cards that are 80lb stock paper. This is a hangover from the days when such forms had to be kept for a long time.

However, according to the group, that requirement has long since stopped being important since all applications are immediately scanned and stored in a computer database and are no longer physically stored.

However, for some reason, just before the voter registration date is about to end, Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State ordered local election boards to send out 'correct forms' and tell voters to re-apply.

The Citizens for Legitimate Government claims that the local boards have been snowed under with requests and can't process the voter application forms in time.

The result is that they will not be able to vote.

» Voters rejected because of paper weight

    
    
    

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times sued Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday, seeking to block the Justice Department from obtaining records of telephone calls between two veteran journalists and their confidential sources.

The lawsuit said the Justice Department was "on the verge" of getting records as part of a probe aimed at learning the identity of government employees who may have provided information to the newspaper. It asked a judge to intervene.

The paper said the government intends to get the records, which reflect confidential communications between the journalists Philip Shenon and Judith Miller and their sources, from third parties unlikely to be interested in challenging its authority.