My wife called our county voter's office because her middle name is on the license and her maiden name on the voter registration. They said you are OK under the law as long as the two names are substantially the same. It is always best to be careful, though. A change in your voter name can be done with an online form, that is then printed out, signed and mailed into your county.

I didn't really think that I would have a problem with that "substantially the same" bit, but I wanted it EXACT. I wanted the exact same name on both, because this election is too important to try an experiment with it.

The name on my drivers license and voter registration now match.

I've voted in the same precinct for 45 years and have never needed a photo ID but I'm not willing to chance it under the circumstances. The bigger and more important issue I have with the voting process is those $#%^$% hackable voting machines. When is somebody in this state going to seriously address that?

whether you are actively on the rolls of voters. This will not tell you whether the voter ID with any variation of your name of the voter registration will work. What I would like to see is the list of voters on the rolls who PA DOT has determined do not have valid ID.

tells us some famous named Dems who may have poll problems, and the interactive link lets people enter personal info to see if their name is flagged, but it would be nice to see the whole DOT list.

I recced your post and link at a petition delivery action to our Allegheny County elections office, Tuesday. I used the link, and it said I'm good to vote. But if I'm told at the polls that there's a problem with my license, all I can say to poll workers is that the P-G site said I was fine. Which may just elicit a laugh from them instead of permission to use the voting machine.

The other possibility is that I re-register to vote, to make sure that my voter registration has my middle initial on it, like my driver's license photo ID. Which may give the state chapter of Rove repugs an opportunity to hold up processing the new voter reg.

They're trying to force us into a lose-lose situation, and create hours-long lines at Dem stronghold polls.

you get a provisional ballot, vote, and deal with the problem later.

Spread the word. Make sure everyone knows about provisional ballots.

The 1 866 OUR VOTE and 1 866 MY VOTE 1 phone numbers were working for '04 and '08 Presidential elections, to report problems and irregularities. League of Women Voters has a contact button on their Vote411.org web-site.

Bev Harris's Black Box voting, Brad Blog and the Velvet Revolution, Fitrakis and Wasserman's FreePress.org, Mark Crispin Miller. If anyone I know has a problem, I'll encourage them to contact everyone. That way, even if their individual vote doesn't get counted, their attempt to vote will count.

Our county ran out of provisionals in 82 Dem stronghold voting precincts in '04, which backed up the voting lines, for hours in some places, so people who couldn't wait were blocked from voting. Our elections people had printed < 20 % of the ballots Philly supplied for the same population, and Rove's Sproul \ Lincoln Strategies repugs had been merrily re-registering voters to different precincts and party affiliations, using bogus petition drives for 'auto insurance reform' and 'protect battered women' to get the voter's info. Allegheny County ranked # 1 in the nation for reported complaints (6,089) about election problems, surpassing Wayne County Michigan and Broward County Florida.

About half of the 8,000 provisionals cast were later found 'invalid', according to elections officials. But notice there have been zero cases of voter I.D. fraud prosecuted in PA, and you have to sign an affidavit to cast a vote. I think that shows that the 'invalid' ones were invalidated due to repug election fraud activities, or Attorney General Rubble would have prosecuted someone, and Breitbart and O'Keefe would have done a hard-hitting expose of 4,000 'illegal' attempted Dem voters.

Marty Levine from Pgh's City Paper covered one woman's two month effort to see if her provisional ballot 'counted'. After calling and also punching her nine digit number into the county elections web-site many times, she finally on Dec 3 got the message 'Counted because.' . Not a comforting message, but her efforts and media coverage of them means her vote attempt definitely counted for something.