MISSOULA -- If you don't think the Missoula County elections office is busy, just try calling.

"We don't have our phone off the hook," said Elections Administrator Vickie Zeier on Thursday after receiving several complaints about busy signals. "We are hardly putting the phone down. Some people are e-mailing because they are not getting through."

Election time is busy, but not typically this busy. Part of that is because of competing requests by both presidential campaigns, expressing concern for the integrity of the voting process here. Montana is a battleground state and the campaigns have taken on a newfound interest in how local elections are executed in the Treasure State.

The Barack Obama campaign is using a magnifying glass to inspect the process, asking questions like: Do you have enough election judges? How were they trained? How many polling places do you have? Have you made any polling-place changes?

Republicans, meanwhile, continue their efforts to fight what they see as possible voter fraud with questions about cleaning the voter rolls.

Two days before the state Republican Party withdrew its challenges of several thousand registered voters in the state based on address discrepancies, Montana's former U.S. senator, Conrad Burns, e-mailed every county elections official in the state asking for the last time the county had "purged" its list of registered voters.

"As chairman of the McCain/Padin (sic) campaign here in Montana, we are getting reports from all across the country of fraudulent registrations and the abuse and mis-use (sic) of our liberal laws to get more people to participate in our system," he wrote.

Such requests are creating a burden on local elections officials. In Missoula County, elections staff members haven't had a day off in two weeks. Zeier corresponds with two or three attorneys from both campaigns every day.

"We understand how important this election is," Zeier said. "We understand this is probably history in the making. But we also have a job to get done. These competing requests and issues bog down our workload."

With so many eyes on the process, Zeier is more cautious when responding to these requests and relying more heavily on the county attorney's office.

Especially before early voting began this week, Zeier said she was conversing more with the Obama campaign than with McCain's.

Obama campaign spokesman Caleb Weaver says their inquiries are not meant be interpreted as hovering, but helping.

"We are trying to avoid issues before they become issues," he said.

It's no secret that the Obama campaign is focused on turning out voters. Heavily contested races in battleground states is where problems sometimes arise, Weaver said. The campaign wants to work with local officials, so that when the rush shows up on Election Day, they are prepared.

"We are trying to avoid situations that make it harder for people to cast their ballot," he said.

For his part, Burns said Thursday in a telephone interview that making it easier to cast a ballot such as with same-day registration is where misconduct creeps into the election process. Burns dislikes same-day registration.

"I think it's a terrible, terrible way to treat people who actually live here and do everything the legal way and then have someone come up (on Election Day) and have a telephone bill and register and vote," he said.

Burns said he was not asking counties to purge their voter rolls, but merely questioning as to the last time it had happened. He said he was satisfied with the responses he received from county elections officials.

Burns, a Republican, was defeated in 2006 in a very close race with Democrat Jon Tester.

Every two years, the state does housekeeping on the voter database. Voters who fail to cast ballots in three consecutive federal general elections, and who fail to respond to notices from the local elections office, are wiped from the system, said Bowen Greenwood, spokesman for Secretary of State Brad Johnson. The next housecleaning occurs after the 2008 election.

The counties gave up this responsibility a year ago with the creation of a statewide voter database.

Plus, as pointed out by Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg in response to Burns' e-mail, it's against federal law to cancel a voter's registration within 90 days of an election. So there's no way to purge the rolls, as Nov. 4 is less than a month away.

Despite the close eye both presidential campaigns are keeping on local elections offices, Greenwood said that "we have the utmost confidence in the election administrators. They are doing their job very well and Brad has every hope that the presidential campaigns share that confidence."