Albert Hill, 56, of Philadelphia said that he argued for 10 minutes with a poll monitor who insisted that he would not be allowed to vote unless he showed his photo identification and that he watched two women leave the line in front of him after they were turned away for the same reason.
“I told her, ‘If you want to play this game, here is my wallet, and here’s my ID, but I don’t have to show it to vote,’ ” said Hill, a former bottle manufacturing company employee. “As of last night, the governor and the mayor of Philadelphia said I don’t have to show my ID to vote.”
Ron Ruman, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said that his office gave poll workers clear instructions that they could ask for but not demand voter identification, and that he thinks such problems are limited.
“We heard very few scattered reports of this, and we really weren’t able to confirm any of it. I don’t know for sure what happened,” he said. “If poll workers said this, they were mistaken and this should not have happened.”
In the critical battleground of Ohio, Democrats expressed concerns about elevated numbers of voters in predominantly African American areas casting provisional ballots. Election officials and strategists predicted a sharp increase in the number of provisional ballots cast, possibly twice as many as the 150,000 in 2008. Under Ohio law, provisional ballots are not counted until 10 days after an election.
In New Jersey and New York, voters struggled with the residual effects of Hurricane Sandy. As polls opened Tuesday, an estimated 600,000 New Jersey residents still lacked electricity and thousands remained in emergency shelters. New Jersey officials said over the weekend that those displaced by the storm would be able to vote by e-mail. But many voters reported that they did not receive electronic ballots from county elections offices after uploading applications. Late Tuesday afternoon, the state extended the deadline for submitting e-mail and fax ballots to 8 p.m. Friday.
In Ocean County, along the Atlantic Coast, half of the 229 polling places remained inoperable because of storm damage. Election officials improvised by driving a rented Winnebago to shelters.
“We were scrambling, figuring out what to do,” said George Gilmore, chairman of the Board of Elections. “We heard about this bus and we grabbed it.”
In New York City, officials reported long lines at polling places that had been consolidated after the storm. Voters in the Rockaways and the Bronx were voting in tents powered by generators.
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