Early voting starts Monday. Absentee ballots are also an option. We're less than three weeks from the Nov. 4 presidential election and already the partisan charges and counter-attacks are swirling about suspected voter fraud, no-match/no-vote rules and dead people pulling a Weekend at Bernie's and voting.

Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning has called for a little sanity on all sides. In a state with 10.7 million people registered to vote, we need a system to verify each voter's identity. No one wants a rerun of the hanging, pregnant and dimpled chads of 2000 that made Flori-duh a national laughingstock.

The angst rises with every scandal. Two voter-registration cards found to be suspect in Seminole County have caused a firestorm among Republicans worried that get-out-the-vote groups, like ACORN, are manipulating the system. ''We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election,'' Sen. John McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, said in an e-mail to supporters this week in a pitch to raise more money.

ACORN BEING INVESTIGATED

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has long ties with Democrat Barack Obama, who worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In fact, ACORN's political action committee has endorsed the Illinois senator for president.

ACORN is being investigated in several states, as any group should be that is suspected of fraud. In Florida, coordinator Brian Kettering told The Miami Herald recently that ACORN has a system to check registration forms collected by its workers and that it flags forms as ''problematic'' before delivering to county elections supervisors. Good, then the organization shouldn't be too worried about investigations.

Catching registration fraud is exactly what Florida should be doing -- to avoid ballot fraud later on. Get 'em early, and problem solved.

That's why the so-called no-match/no-vote rule -- the voter verification law -- makes sense. It does not turn anyone away at the polls who has an identification card, such as a driver's license, with a picture and a signature that can be checked by a poll worker. A person's address on the card doesn't even have to match -- people could have moved and not changed their address on their license. You can still vote.

The law does, however, make sure that anyone registering to vote for the first time can be checked against a Florida driver's license database or the Social Security database. If you show up dead on a list, you need to correct the government's information.

ABSENTEE BALLOTS

No party has cornered the elections-fraud market.

Republicans in South Florida have long been accused of using absentee ballots to sweet-talk elderly voters at senior centers to vote their way. Dead people voting? Miami certainly has had its share of those scandals.

And now that absentee ballots don't have to be witnessed by anyone else -- a change the state made in 2004 -- it won't help build trust. Already 1.6 million absentee ballots have been requested statewide. It makes ACORN's tally of 152,000 new voters it signed up in Florida seem puny.

Browning maintains Florida's tougher laws will help spot the abuses, but he concedes some fake absentee ballots may get through because he lacks staff to check all 11 million voter registrations.

It's one more reason for the Legislature to adequately fund the state's top elections office. One's vote is sacred. Too much is at stake to let partisan finger-pointing cause voters to lose confidence in this historic election.

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