Glitches, but overall voting goes smoothly

In the battleground state of Missouri, Joyce Barger left her injured daughter in a St. Louis hospital and drove 30 miles to vote in the tiny rural town of Cedar Hill, only to be told to come back later because her polling place had run out of ballots.

In Florida, where chaos in the 2000 election triggered a nationwide drive to improve voting systems, lines backed up sporadically when voting machines malfunctioned.

And in South Carolina, poll workers refused to let the governor cast a ballot when he arrived without the documentation required by the state’s voter identification law.

Despite these and other problems, the hotly contested midterm election appeared to go off with relatively few problems Tuesday -- especially considering that 90% of the nation was using new high-tech equipment to cast ballots.

South Carolina GOP Gov. Mark Sanford was able to cast his ballot after returning home to get the necessary identification.

Democratic and Republican election monitors tracked the voting closely, preparing for possible legal challenges if problems developed in any of the races that could determine control of the House and Senate.

It was not clear whether any of the reported problems would prove serious enough to affect the outcome of pivotal races.

All in all, election administrators said, they were relieved. “It is looking like it held up better than expected,” said Deborah L. Markowitz, president of the National Assn. of Secretaries of State and Vermont’s secretary of state.

One exception seemed to be Denver, where an experiment with centralized voting in a few super-sized precincts went awry with hours-long lines and equipment failures.

“With the exception of Denver, it all seems to be fender-benders and no pileups,” said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project, which tracks America’s transition to high-tech voting.

Officials at the federal Election Assistance Commission, created to help the states after the 2000 Florida presidential election debacle, said they were satisfied with the national trend.

“When you look at a situation where we have 183,000 precincts in this country, there have been very, very few problems proportionately,” said commission Executive Director Thomas R. Wilkey.

Nationally, about a third of registered voters were using high-tech voting equipment for the first time, according to Election Data Services, a consulting firm that assists the states. Nearly 90% of all voters cast ballots using either touch-screen machines or optically scanned paper ballots.

High turnout complicated voting in some places. In Missouri, the precinct at Cedar Hill Lutheran Church ran out of ballots by 10 a.m. because, a local official said, they had failed to anticipate how many voters would turn out.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Barger, 50, whose daughter had been seriously hurt in a car accident. “The only reason I’m being so persistent is that I really believe we need a change in this state.” She was able to vote on her second attempt.

In the Cleveland area, a federal judge ordered that 16 precincts remain open until 9 p.m. to compensate for problems in the morning.

Similar problems were reported in Broward County, Fla., north of Miami. In Pennsylvania, two counties extended voting hours because of technical glitches.

And some precincts in Utah opened late because poll workers could not get the machines to work properly.

In Virginia, state and federal authorities were investigating allegations of efforts before election day to intimidate or misdirect Democratic voters in eight counties. One man said that a phone caller -- purporting to represent Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb -- had directed him to a polling place at what he recognized as a nonexistent address after he said he was voting for Webb.

Tuesday’s lapses demonstrate that the U.S. election system still needs major improvement, said Steven Hertzberg, director of the nonpartisan Election Science Institute in California.

“The election system is immature, and it is incomplete,” said Hertzberg, an aeronautical engineer by training. “We have the technology and the know-how to do much better.”

In some places, confusion over new laws requiring voters to provide identification prompted complaints and a few embarrassments. Missouri’s top election official was prevented from voting when poll workers incorrectly demanded she present a photo ID. (Missouri law only requires some proof of residency, such as a utility bill.)

“The problems that we are seeing today ... are systemic and across the country,” said Brenda Wright, managing attorney with the National Voting Rights Institute, part of a coalition of groups monitoring the elections. “We have got to do a better job of making voting accessible to everyone.”

In University City, Mo., a largely African American suburb of St. Louis, Jacqueline Judie said she was confronted by a sign that seemed to incorrectly suggest that voters needed some form of identification with a signature to vote. But when Judie complained, she said, poll workers refused to take down the sign.

“I was very surprised,” Judie said. “It’s really disappointing that in this day and age you still have this kind of impediment to voting.”

Voting rights advocates also reported problems with new laws in Ohio, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

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ricardo.alonso-zaldivar@latimes.com

noam.levey@latimes.com

Times staff writers P.J. Huffstutter in Missouri and Carol J. Williams in Miami contributed to this report.