WASHINGTON (AP) - An unpleasant Election Day scenario: A heavy turnout and a close election lead to a flood of court challenges. Legal groups are offering judges new online resources to prepare for such a deluge.

"These are things lawyers and judges do not deal with on a day-to-day basis," American Bar Association president H. Thomas Wells Jr. said Friday. "We are not necessarily predicting more disputes, but we just wanted to be as prepared as possible."

The ABA has created a state-by-state list of election laws, providing basic information about who may cast a ballot and when votes can be challenged. The National Center for State Courts, working with the College of William & Mary law school, has put together video lectures and a manual on election law with chapters devoted to tallying the ballots and recounts, as well as post-election challenges.

Besides the presidential election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, there are a number of congressional, state and local races throughout the country on Nov. 4.

The number of election lawsuits has risen dramatically in recent election years, according to research by Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. There were 361 cases in 2004, the last presidential election year, up from 197 in 2000 and 108 in 1996, Hasen found. The bulk of the challenges are filed in state court.

John Hardin Young, a Washington lawyer who represents Democrats in recounts, said the training and expertise of elections officials varies across the thousands of voting jurisdictions in the United States.

"Things happen so quickly on Election Day that getting the facts and the law right to arrive at a reasoned, fair result is put to the test," said Young, who worked on the ABA project.

The guide for judges and other resources are at http://www.abanet.org/vote/2008.

The Justice Department plans to dispatch hundreds of federal monitors to make sure voters aren't unfairly kept from the polls.