The leaders of the US Muslim community said that they will announce whether they will endorse any political candidate for president this year, and if so whom, in mid-October.
Community leaders have been talking to the two major political parties and to some minor candidates for months, but have been reluctant to throw their backing to any presidential hopeful without some tangible commitments in return.
Burned by their experience in the last election cycle, when they delivered a bloc vote for the Republican Party -- one that many feel backfired on them after the terror attacks of 2001 -- the leadership has adopted a different strategy for the 2004 presidential elections.
This time they want commitments on protections for Muslim civil rights up front, and on the record.
"There is a crisis of civil rights for Muslims in this country," said Agha Saeed, chairman of the American Muslim Alliance, (AMA). "Today, Muslims and Arabs are second-class citizens in the United States."
Speaking at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, Saeed said the presidential hopeful who hoped to win the Muslim bloc vote must "take a public position on principles (already) enshrined in the US constitution.
"Any person who will not take a position... will not receive our vote."
Saeed and his colleagues from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) insist they are not looking for any special treatment, merely the restoration of rights eroded by the USA Patriot Act.
Many Muslims complain that the law, introduced in 2001 in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, has been used to intimidate and harass Arab and Muslim Americans.
The AMA and eight other Muslim organisations are pressing for the repeal of parts of the act, which allows FBI agents to search library records and conduct secret "sneak and peek" searches among other things.
Their other demand is for the abolition of so-called "secret evidence" in immigration hearings.
The groups have formed an elections task force that has held voter registration drives and town hall meetings across the country.
While their numbers are relatively modest, representatives insist that they can mobilise significant numbers of voters in swing states such as Ohio, Michigan and Florida, where the margin of victory is likely to be wafer-thin.
So far, the Democratic Party has failed to rise to the challenge, said Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR.
"The only one who has spoken about the erosion of civil rights is (independent presidential hopeful) Ralph Nader," said Awad.
"He has been vocal and critical of certain policies."
A long-time consumer activist, of Lebanese origin, Nader is widely seen as unelectable, but Democrats fear he could be a spoiler in this election, siphoning off much-needed votes from their presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry.
Nader held a closed-door meeting with several of the community's power brokers here Saturday on the sidelines of the ISNA convention, the largest annual gathering of Muslim Americans.