A new voter identification law and attempts to challenge voters at the polls could lead to long lines on Tuesday.

With Michigan facing an expected record turnout of voters, voters rights advocates are concerned that poll workers’ confusion over a new law requiring identification when voting — but allowing voters without ID to sign an affidavit instead — and partisan attempts to block people from voting will lead to vote suppression.

“Our sense of things is really that [suppression] is going to happen in areas where it’s always happened — low-income and African-American precincts,” said Mary Bejian, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. “I would expect that to be especially true this time not only because of expected high voter turnout but high expected African-American voter turnout.”

Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has predicted more than 5 million people will vote in this election, which is 70 percent of those registered. In 2004, 4.8 million eligible voters cast ballots.

Along with the uptick in expected turnout, Michigan’s new voter identification law could create problems at the polls. The secretary of state estimates that 370,000 Michigan residents do not have photo identification. Those people — or anyone else who fails to bring ID with them Tuesday — can still vote so long as they sign an affidavit swearing they are who they say they are.

However, the cities of Allen Park and Grand Blanc during this year’s primary season informed their residents in town newsletters that they must bring ID with them to vote and made no mention of the option to sign an affidavit instead.

“If they don’t know about [the affidavit option], poll workers probably don’t either,” Bejian said. “That’s the kind of problem that’s going to hold up lines.” The ACLU immediately wrote a letter to Allen Park officials informing them of their error, and the city responded effectively, she said.

“Allen Park has a fairly new election administration and simply didn’t understand the law and were very appreciative that we spoke with them,” she said. The city took out a newspaper ad days before the primary, and the city clerk did several radio and cable spots explaining the affidavit option to the public.

The other area of major concern for voters’ rights advocates is what Bejian called “unnecessary challengers, who throw up challenges willy-nilly and poll workers not trained to deal with fraudulent challenges.”

Organizations like the Michigan Election Coalition and the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law are working together to closely monitor the election — especially any challenges to voters. The Lawyers’ Committee is training mobile legal teams of law students, paralegals and lawyers around the country to deal with challengers and has created a hotline (866-OUR-VOTE) for voters to report problems. The NAACP and the Barack Obama campaign also have hotlines.

The Michigan Election Coalition, a collection of groups like the ACLU, the AFL-CIO, the Michigan State Conference NAACP and others, plans to have hundreds of trained non-partisan challengers in place in precincts around the state to monitor and challenge the partisan challengers. If a coalition challenger encounters possible voter suppression, he or she will call the Lawyers’ Committee hotline and the committee will dispatch one of its mobile teams to the precinct.

Tierney Eaton, the Michigan Election Coalition’s coordinator, said she’s especially concerned about first-time voters on college campuses and in socioeconomically diverse communities like Warren, Southfield and Sterling Heights.

“It’ll be great to have those people [the monitors] on the ground,” Eaton said. “But I don’t think you can take anything for granted in this election. It’s really about being prepared.”

The ACLU also plans to have extra monitors in Macomb County to ensure election officials there don’t illegally use foreclosed-homes lists to prevent voters from casting a ballot, a possible scenario first reported by Michigan Messenger.

Voter suppression can take other insidious forms: In 2004, the ACLU heard anecdotes that in Flint, a city with a large African-American and lower-income population, voters were approached by people posing as poll workers as they waited in line and asked if they had any outstanding arrest warrants, owed child support and could pass a literacy test, questions that are “likely to make vulnerable voters go home,” Bejian said.

There is encouraging news: City clerks have been planning for the large voter turnout by assigning more voting stations to their precincts, which should ease lines. The state of Michigan recommends that a precinct have one voting station per 100 voters.

In Flint, a city with 93,000 registered voters and 61 precincts, City Clerk Inez Brown said she has been preparing “all year” for the election and plans to “put as many stations in each precinct as it will accommodate.” Benton Harbor’s 10,541 registered voters will have 100 machines. Pontiac, with 47,000 registered voters, will have at least 16 stations in each of its 28 precincts. Port Huron’s 11 precincts will have different numbers of stations depending on precinct size, but the city is committed to a 1-100 ratio.

Some of Michigan’s smaller, whiter communities are lagging the larger, more diverse ones: Marquette’s 15,166 registered voters will occupy seven precincts, each with 16 voting stations (that’s 135 voters per station); Grosse Pointe’s 4,677 voters will share 26 stations in two precincts (180 voters per station); and the 2,121 voters in one of Bloomfield Hills’ two precincts will have 15 stations (141 voters per station).

In Detroit, City Clerk Janice Winfrey has implemented a line marshal program where trained marshals will answer voters’ questions, help with crowd control and verify precinct locations by communicating with poll workers inside the precinct who will be able to look voters up on laptops.

“You can never say what’s going to happen but I think people have really mobilized since 2000,” Eaton said. “Even from 2004 I think we’ve made great gains. But there’s still a lot of work to do.”