PORTLAND (AP) - A lot can go wrong in an election, even outside of Florida.

But the confusion in that state during the 2000 presidential election led Congress to pass the 2002 Help America Vote Act.

The law, among other things, required states to prepare a centralized electronic database of the voter registration information that long has been the province of county clerks.

In Oregon, that means 36 county voter registration databases will be consolidated into one that can be accessed by elections officers in each of the state's counties.

Oregon's situation is unique in that it had shifted to a vote-by-mail system and embarked on its own centralized database project when the voting act became law. As a result, the technology vendors and consultants who are preparing for the transition say that Oregon is steering clear of the problems plaguing some states.

"We're spending a great deal of time up front in terms of thinking through the risks," said Glenn Newkirk, a North Carolina consultant hired by the secretary of state to assist in planning the transition to the centralized database.

Newkirk, who is president of InfoSentry Services of Raleigh, N.C., helped the state construct its request for proposals to technology vendors, a process that resulted in the choice of Salem's Saber Consulting in August.

Oregon has agreed to pay a little less than $11 million to Saber, whose bid was more than $6 million cheaper than the next-lowest bid among the three finalists.

Most of the financing comes from the federal government. Deputy Secretary of State Paddy McGuire said Oregon has received or expects soon to receive about $33.9 million from Washington, D.C., and it could receive $5.7 million or so more from the government. Much of that has gone to other voting-act projects, such as new voting machines for counties that were still using punch-card systems, the kind deemed unreliable in Florida.

Merging data from the 36 counties is only part of Oregon's challenge. People who devote themselves to making electronic systems secure worry about a variety of potential problems: An outside intruder can crack into a network over the Internet, reading, altering or deleting files.

Oregon's request-for-proposal for the voter registration database project stressed security elements, and the Saber team had the best answers, said Julie Pearson, the state's executive overseeing the project.

Nitin Khanna, the founder and CEO of Saber, said security has been "integrated into the project from Day One."

In addition to the security risks, information technology projects can be derailed by poor project management, vendor indifference or political infighting.