With the presidential election this insanely close — at one point, Democrat Al Gore was reported behind Republican George W. Bush by 225 votes in all-important Florida — complaints of flaws in our voting process are coming in from all directions.

Being able to vote in America is not just like the right to drive, drink or buy a gun. The right to vote is something Americans have fought and died for, from the American revolution to women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.

It’s something people in nations across the globe are fighting for today. That anyone would be denied this right is unconscionable.

Black Democratic activist Rev. Jesse Jackson says he received phone calls on Election Day from blacks who said they were turned away from the polls in Florida and other Southern states.

In the year 2000, despite our distinct lack of space cars and retinal scans, one would think we would have a fair voting system.

We know — from examples such as that of James Byrd, a black man who was dragged to death from a truck — that blacks still face discrimination in our country.

The right to vote, however, is a Constitutional right one wouldn’t think anyone could infringe upon.

In another case of election flaws, thousands of senior citizens in Palm Beach County seem to have voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Gore.

And, once again, this is not just a casual mishap. These are people, a large portion of them Jewish, who were alive during World War II. Some of them may have fought the Nazis in that war, while others may have been in concentration camps and still more whose families died in those camps.

For them to vote for Buchanan — who praised Hitler in his book, “Right from the Beginning” — is also horrible.

Apparently several of them are crying over this mishap. I don’t blame them. I can see how awful it would feel to accidentally cast your vote for someone you consider (though perhaps unfairly) the equivalent of those who killed millions of your people. And here they meant to support the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman.

Charges of voter fraud and irregularities have been made in other places around America.

In New York, there were reports of ballot shortages, broken machines and missing names on voter registration lists.

In Michigan, a 400-pound bear trapped voters inside one location. The bear eventually had to be shot to death.

St. Louis voting times were extended by 40 minutes due to long lines in that city.

In Chicago, where dead people voted for Kennedy in 1960, many registered voters are crying fraud after not finding their names on lists.

Here in Ames, polling employees did not ask for identification from voters. It would have been easy to go to each polling spot in town five times with five different names and addresses per precinct and have over 100 free votes.

Technology isn’t helping, either. Internet voting experiments in some areas have led to vote selling over the Web.

Absentee ballots could lead to the same problem. In Florida (always the center of voting complaints) several boxes of absentee ballots were ignored in the original calculations.

Some people (mostly Republicans, I’m sure) have called for Gore to step down and concede the race to Bush. That would hurt our electoral process, I think.

The American people are supposed to elect their own leader, and we should try as hard as we can to find out who the people chose, in Florida and other disputed states. The right to vote is an important one, and we can’t take it out of citizens’ hands.

President Clinton said Wednesday, “The American people have spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.” Maybe the American people have been trying to speak, but their words don’t seem to be getting through.