Machines malfunctioned, tempers flared and edgy voters often waited hours Tuesday to pick a president in a contentious race watched by thousands of monitors who expected the worst.
But by the close of East Coast and Midwest polls, only scattered local flubs had been reported amid an election turnout that was shaping up to be the heaviest in years.
“So far, it’s no big, but lots of littles,” said Doug Chapin, director of the Election Reform Information Project, a nonpartisan research group. “We know of no major meltdowns anywhere along the lines some people were worried about.”
In Colorado, Republican Party officials said a lawyer for the Democrats showed up at an Eagle County precinct with a list of registered GOP voters, planning to challenge them all. Democrats acknowledged it was true.
In other closely contested states, including Iowa and Michigan, the liberal group MoveOn.org was accused of disrupting local precincts. In Ohio, after a woman filed a lawsuit on behalf of voters who didn’t receive absentee ballots on time, all were allowed to cast provisional ballots.
The NAACP filed a Justice Department complaint in Detroit, saying 35 voters complained they were harassed by Republican poll watchers. In Milwaukee, police said tires were slashed on about 20 get-out-the-vote vehicles leased by the GOP.
New touch-screen voting machines, criticized by computer scientists and elections officials in several states as susceptible to hacking and malfunction, were used in 29 states and the District of Columbia. Only Nevada has mandated that the machines produce paper receipts, which experts say are needed for accurate recounts.
Electronic voting appeared to take its worst hit in New Orleans, where precinct workers were forced to tell voters to come back because of problems with machines that did not start up properly.
Florida had a few problems of its own in that area. In the state that gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush on the basis of 537 votes, 10 touch-screen voting machines failed at various precincts in Broward County. Nearly half the state’s voters were using the machines.
Provisional ballots, new to this election, also prompted worries. Any voter whose name did not appear on precinct rolls was entitled to cast a provisional – or paper – ballot. But elections officials must individually certify them as being cast by registered voters before they can be counted.
Some polling stations in the important swing state of Pennsylvania saw provisional ballots run out. Precincts scattered across the state stayed open past the scheduled closing time of 8 p.m. because of huge lines.
Provisional ballots also ran out in New Mexico, but were quickly replaced by election officials.
Meanwhile, this didn’t turn out to be the breakout year for young voters that some had anticipated.
Fewer than one in 10 voters Tuesday were 18 to 24 years old, about the same proportion of the electorate as in 2000, exit polls indicated.
A vigorous push on college campuses by both parties and national mobilization drives raised expectations that 2004 would be the year of the youth vote.
Exit polls indicated that young people who did vote were strongly supporting Democrat Sen. John Kerry over President Bush, while they were evenly split between Bush and Democrat Al Gore four years ago.
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