Not so for all voters -- a lesson that became brutally clear during Florida's presidential election fiasco.

The ability to read has not been a requirement to vote in more than 25 years. But with 24 million functionally illiterate adult Americans, the ability to understand a ballot has become its own literacy test.

"The Supreme Court says there can't be a literacy test to vote. But if you put the bar high enough, it's a literacy test in a new form," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan.

By creating ballots that were confusing even to educated people, Florida election officials jeopardized the ability to vote for thousands of people who lack an education, who have reading disabilities or who were born before standardized testing made fill-in-the-bubble a familiar part of growing up.

In its examination of invalid ballots in 15 Florida counties, a team of reporters from the Sun-Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune found thousands of ballots on which people negated their own votes by improperly filling in the bubbles, voting for too many candidates and failing to follow instructions. In some cases ballots were left blank.

Pam Karlan, a professor of law at Stanford University, said ever since Congress banned literacy voting tests in 1975, a growing number of people have assumed illiteracy no longer is a barrier at the polls.

But as Florida's election showed, the problem remains. It's not a problem of race, she said, but one of education.

"Voting is one place where it's difficult to get by without reading," said Karlan, who studies voting rights issues and recently wrote a book, When Elections Go Bad. "Literacy is a big barrier to political participation."

Trouble in Gadsden

A prime example is Gadsden County, Florida's only predominantly black county. Gadsden had the highest percentage of discarded presidential ballots of Florida's 67 counties.

And St. John Precinct had the largest percentage of invalid votes in the county. The precinct, nestled beside the Georgia state line, is anchored by St. John Elementary School, where 89 percent of the students are black, 10 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are white -- children of farm laborers who work the tomato fields.

This is a poor county and its schools reflect that. All but one of 16 Gadsden's public schools received a D on a statewide report card from the Department of Education. The best school in the county got a C.

Half of Gadsden's adult black population didn't graduate from high school.

Almost a fourth of St. John Precinct's presidential ballots were tossed out because voters didn't follow directions. They either voted for more than one candidate or didn't fill in the ballot's optical-scan bubbles properly.

Vivian Kelly, an 81-year-old retired schoolteacher and Democratic activist, doesn't think that voters intentionally ignored the directions and negated their own votes.

In many cases, she contends, they couldn't read them.

"We had a lot of people register at the last minute this summer, but some of them just didn't know how to vote," said Kelly. "There are little things that you have to tell people who don't read well."

White voters in Florida also had problems understanding the ballot.

In Lake County's Precinct 65, which is 99 percent white, 123 voters filled out their ballots incorrectly. In Levy County's Precinct 1, which is 89 percent white, 47 presidential ballots were rejected because of voter error.

The problem is that ballots in Gadsden and 13 other counties examined by the newspapers are unnecessarily complex and confusing -- even to educated voters.

"Some of the things here are not just problems that would throw someone with literacy problems," said Shanahan, director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "I could imagine a good reader would find this confusing."

Poor design

The ballot stumbling blocks range from poor design to arcane and ambiguous language. Some examples:

A voter is instructed to ask for a new ballot if "you spoil your ballot." A "spoiled ballot" is elections-speak for a ballot on which a voter has made a mistake. Literacy experts suggest just saying, "If you make a mistake, ask for another ballot."

"Vote for ONE Group" could be interpreted as instructions to vote for a group of candidates instead of one pair of presidential and vice presidential candidates. The Florida supervisors of elections, meeting in Kissimmee last week, proposed to change the wording to "Vote for One."

A space at the bottom of the presidential ballot allows for "write-in candidates." But that can be misinterpreted as an instruction to write in the name of a candidate you already voted for. In fact, 962 voters in 15 Florida counties did just that -- invalidating their ballots by voting for the candidate and then writing in his name in the space provided below.

Placement of the ballot bubble between the names of presidential and vice presidential candidates is confusing. In November, many voters drew their own bubbles by the names of the presidential candidates -- mirroring how the bubbles were aligned next to candidates for U.S. Senate, Congress and other races. Other states placed the bubble next to the name of the presidential candidate.

State-mandated wording at the top of the presidential ballot that "a vote for the candidates will actually be a vote for their electors" is an Election Day civics lesson that likely confuses voters. Other states have ballots that simply state, "vote for president and vice president."

Splitting the presidential candidates into two columns -- without any explanation that the list of candidates continued in a second column -- was sure to confuse voters. In fact, 4,268 voters in 14 counties with split-column ballots voted for only Gore or Bush in the first column but then nullified that vote by picking another presidential candidate in the second column.

Both Republicans and Democrats succeeded in increasing voter registration and voter turnout for the 2000 presidential election. But if the voters recruited by registration drives can't read or understand the ballot, those efforts are futile.

"In this rush to register voters, the issue of how to vote was overlooked," said Tom Sanson, former chairman of the Republican Party in Jackson County. "If we do a better job with voter education, then I think we will have less mistakes."

In Gadsden County, Vivian Kelly has vowed to take up the crusade herself. After concentrating on registering voters since the 1960s, Kelly now plans a voter education drive to teach people how to properly cast their ballots.

"There are a lot of people who go to the polls and just don't understand," Kelly said.

"I'm going to go precinct by precinct and let them know that there is help available to people if they need it."