Partisan disputes over ballot access and voter registration have escalated in recent days, dragging in both Republican presidential nominee John McCain and his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

McCain advisers are hammering on a favorite GOP villain -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN -- accusing the community group of criminal activity. And Obama's campaign has filed suit to block Michigan Republicans from challenging voters who've lost their homes to foreclosure.

As usual, recent Republican complaints center on voter fraud, while Democrats allege that voters are being disenfranchised and illegally dropped from the rolls.

What's lost in the increasingly shrill attacks and hyperbole is a serious discussion of what's wrong with the nation's voter registration system, and how to fix it. Clearly, as registration-related lawsuits in Florida, New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin attest, that system is not functioning as it should.

The surge in voter registration, coupled with predictions of record turnout on Election Day, have convinced some that another Florida-style meltdown is around the corner.

The problems, as detailed in a flurry of press conferences, congressional hearings, conference calls, reports and legal filings, are myriad. They include: disputes over voter lists, which, despite improvements required by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, remain error-riddled and controversial; obstacles faced by student voters, who are expected to turn out in record numbers on Nov. 4; efforts to challenge voters displaced by foreclosures; and questionable third-party voter registration drives.

Indeed, voter registration has emerged as the defining election management issue of 2008, overshadowing past disputes about touch-screen machines, paper trails and voter identification.

"Voter registration drives, [and] voter registration lists and how they're maintained, have been very hot issues," said Ohio State University law professor Daniel Tokaji. "And I think there's the potential to be a lot of problems with voter registration lists that we're not going to find out until Election Day, or even after."

Caught in the middle are state and local election officials, who complain that last-minute voter registrations tend to overwhelm their already overextended staffs. Some state legislators have responded with burdensome new fines and criminal penalties for third-party voter registration groups. These threaten to shut out eligible voters and fail to solve the root problem, say voting rights advocates.

To be sure, some groups -- ACORN in particular -- have acted carelessly. ACORN workers have faced criminal convictions for submitting fraudulent registrations in several states, including Pennsylvania, Missouri and Kansas. The group has, at least, instituted some quality controls and stopped paying canvassers based on the number of registrations turned in. But ACORN continues to pay canvassers up to $8 an hour, a questionable practice.

"We see it as a big problem that people are being paid to register voters," said George Pillsbury, policy and development director of the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network. "It's not a good practice, and it leads to all sorts of fake registrations, which just overwhelms election officials."

Still, voter registration fraud virtually never translates into fraudulent voting at the polls, according to an extensive study [PDF] by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, which has helped challenge registration restrictions in court. "Even if there was this kind of misconduct going on, the particular restrictions that we've seen cropping up all over the country don't address those problems anyway," said Brennan Center deputy director Wendy R. Weiser.

Weiser and other voting rights advocates endorse sweeping reforms such as so-called universal, or automatic, voter registration, which is prevalent in other Western democracies. Under this system, government officials automatically register voters based on motor vehicle, postal, social service or other public records. Such systems tend to be paired with national ID cards, however, and could face resistance in the U.S.

More promising in the near term is Election Day registration, which is the law in more than half a dozen states and is growing in popularity. In Minnesota, which has offered Election Day registration for 35 years, voter turnout was 78 percent in 2004 and could top 80 percent this year.

"We've got both the highest turnout and the cleanest elections, and these things are linked," said Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. Fraud is virtually a non-issue, Ritchie said, noting the state prosecutes fraud as a felony and typically has no more than a single case per election cycle. "Because everyone's in the same database, you're always caught," Ritchie added.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., has introduced a bill, the Election Day Registration Act, that would require states to offer Election Day registration to eligible voters. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, has introduced a companion bill in the House.

The surge in voter registration, coupled with predictions of record turnout on Election Day, have convinced some that another Florida-style meltdown is around the corner. Long lines due to predicted shortages of poll workers, voting machines and ballots, which bogged down record-turnout primaries, could be compounded by disputes over who does and does not belong on the rolls.

Once the dust settles, Congress and the new administration would do well to stop the finger-pointing, and work instead on fixing the broken registration system. As Election Assistance Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez put it: "Voter registration is the gateway. If there aren't enough people to take in voters through that gateway, nothing else matters."