Elections officials across the state face a possible meltdown if too many candidates jump on the Oct. 7 recall ballot to replace Gov. Gray Davis.

"Counties are not ready to handle this," said Contra Costa County voter registrar Steve Weir. "Every elections official in the state is concerned about how this will look for the voter (and) how it's going to be organized."

There's little to stop would-be governors from swamping the ballot. All it takes is $3,500 and 65 signatures.

The diverse list of potential candidates includes last year's GOP nominee, Bill Simon; Cigarettes Cheaper chain founder Ned Roscoe; and Larry C. Flynt of Hustler Magazine fame.

It remains to be seen how many will qualify by the Aug. 9 deadline. So far at least 258 people have picked up papers to enter the race.

If that many were to qualify, it would be more than the state's most populous county, Los Angeles, is prepared for. In Contra Costa, that would force voters to use ballots with numbers but not the candidates' names.

"We may have chaos at some polling places and there are a lot of questions that haven't been answered about what the ballots will look like," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Alice Huffman , head of the NAACP in California, said the group fears polling problems will disenfranchise minority voters as in Florida in 2000. The group is preparing a lawsuit to delay the balloting.

"There are going to be all kinds of infractions that will render a lot of voters unable to participate," she said.

The state Republican Party and recall proponents dismiss those claims as a ploy by Davis allies to thwart the will of voters.

"Gray Davis' union friends know he's going to lose, and they're trying to put up every trick in the book to slow down the inevitable," said Phil Paule, director of Rescue California Recall Gray Davis.

County election officials' concerns and the potential for confusion was apparent in interviews Thursday. Some counties plan to use the obsolete machines that made "pregnant chad" an infamous phrase in 2000.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is still assessing challenges election officials face. Asked if the state has a list of each county voting system and its capacity, spokesman Doug Stone said no.

Elections officials from more than 40 counties aired concerns during a conference call Wednesday with Shelley. "They told us they were assessing their capacity and meeting with their vendors," Stone said. "We'll have a far better sense of what is going on when they report back."

Pressed for time, Los Angeles County is dusting off punch-card technology. In June, registrar Conny McCormack held an office party to retire the 35-year-old machines and begin a switch to optical-scanning.

"We are fully prepared to bring it (the punchcard system) back from retirement for an encore performance," McCormack said.

But those machines cannot handle more than 225 candidates, and there is no plan to accommodate more, she said. "Quite frankly, we haven't discussed it."

Contra Costa also is reverting to older technology, albeit not punch-card machines. If more than 52 candidates are in the race, voters will have to find their candidate's name on a separate list and then mark a corresponding number on a ballot with 312 blank spaces.

"The voter is going to see something radically different," Weir said. "It will be confusing, not only for the voter but for the poll workers."

If more than 312 people run, Contra Costa voters will get another ballot card. That would require elections officials to check votes by hand, slowing post-election work to a crawl. "It would be a monumental task," Weir said. "It would go on forever."

Fearing a shortage of polling locations and workers, counties will consolidate precincts. Los Angeles will go from 5,000 precincts to 1,900. Contra Costa will go from 800 locations to 600.

That concerns the NAACP's Huffman. "Thousands of voters (will) cast their ballots at polling places that they're not familiar with," she said.

"Consolidation will harm historically disadvantaged constituents, especially African-Americans and Latinos."

The NAACP's lawsuit, applauded by the California Labor Federation and the Democratic Party, may be filed today, Huffman said. A Davis appointee to the state Coastal Commission is preparing it.

Democratic Party leaders said the party will scrutinize balloting and has not ruled out legal challenges before or after the vote.

"This election may very well be invalidated ... because people did not have the right and access to their constitutional right to vote," said state Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres.

UC Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady, who studied the 2000 Florida ballot-counting, said reduced polling locations could hurt people with lower incomes and education levels. They tend to have more trouble getting transportation or time off work to vote, he said.

"I don't think discrimination is that big of a problem," he said, "but there are equal protection issues here that are worth thinking about."

Former Secretary of State Bill Jones, a Republican, discounted that. Elections officials routinely consolidate polling locations, he said.

"I don't believe that this current complaint is based on the history or the facts in this election," Jones said. "It would argue that this is more of a political complaint than a substantive complaint."