Lines stretched around buildings and down city blocks as people waited hours to cast ballots in the historic presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. Some touch-screen machines briefly malfunctioned, but the country’s election system seemed to run smoothly.
“For those of us who care about the American process, this was a good day,” said Doug Chapin, director of at the Pew Center on the States. “It was a massive undertaking with staggering levels of turnout.”
The biggest trouble was big crowds, but voters seemed to take it in stride. University students in Florida were prepared to wait hours after polls closed and massive lines remained.
“What’s keeping me here? America needs a change,” said 18-year-old Lauren Feronti at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. “We need to get the right people in office.”
In Maryland, Sen. Benjamin Cardin was heartened after visiting a polling precinct.
“People are happy and smiling,” he said. “People are very anxious to be voting. They really think they are part of history, and they are.”
Sporadic trouble spots
Early voting before Election Day, which drew record crowds in key battleground states, appeared to ease polling pressures Tuesday. Despite long lines, polls in Ohio — which suffered delayed tallies in 2004 because of malfunctioning machines and huge crowds — closed without incident — or lawsuits.
Poll workers and voters performed well. “We didn’t have anything . . . like the meltdowns people feared would occur,” Chapin said.
In hotly contested Pennsylvania, polls also closed with no apparent problems. Earlier Tuesday, a judge dismissed an NAACP lawsuit that sought to force Philadelphia County elections officials to count emergency paper ballots past closing time.
Voting officials said they plan to count those ballots Friday.
Some New Jersey voters were forced to cast paper ballots because of troublesome touch-screen machines. Similar problems popped up elsewhere but were more sporadic than widespread.
“The majority of them seem to be functioning OK, but there are trouble spots, not unexpected,” said Purdue University computer science professor Eugene Spafford, who was watching machine voting issues for the Association of Computing Machinery.
“Happy people out there”
In the West, Californians also faced long lines but voting went smoothly.
In Texas, voting before Election Day was credited with easing turnout. There were some hour-long waits and traffic was steady, but voting officials reported few problems. During that state’s primary earlier this year, long lines stretched for hours and ballots ran out.
“It’s amazing,” said Jacque Callanen, elections administrator for Bexar County, home to San Antonio. “There’s happy people out there.”
Still, voting advocates had worried — tolerant voters or not — that the nation’s myriad election systems might stagger later in the day, when people getting off work hit the polls.
“People have to wait for hours. Some people can do that. Some people can’t. This is not the way to run a democracy,” said Tova Wang of the government watchdog group Common Cause.
Despite the apparent success of Tuesday’s election systems, other activists worried it was too soon to celebrate.
“The kind of things we look for usually don’t show up right away,” said Pam Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that tracks ballot issues.
“We saw people standing in lines for hours and hours because voting machines weren’t working. I have a hard time calling that smooth,” she said.
