ID Rules, Machines Frustrate Early Voters

Early morning voters use electronic voting machines to cast their ballots Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006 at Grace Baptist Church in Cedarville, Ohio. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato) (Kiichiro Sato - AP)

More than 80 percent of the nation's voters were expected to cast some type of electronic ballot Tuesday, which was the deadline for major reforms mandated by the federal Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress to prevent a rerun of the 2000 election debacle.

In some states, the effort to improve the integrity of the election system got off to a shaky start. Long lines formed in Ohio, Illinois and South Carolina.

U.S. District Court Judge Dan A. Polster in Ohio ordered polls stay open until 9 p.m. _ 90 minutes after closing time, after the Ohio Democratic Party sued Cuyahoga County because of crowded precincts.

Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, suffered 14-hour voting lines in 2004. On Tuesday, problems with ballot-reading machines caused delays of more than an hour. For the first time, all 88 Ohio counties used electronic voting _ either touch-screens or paper ballots that are electronically scanned.

In Texas, election officials had to recount ballots after a computer glitch incorrectly showed longshot Constitution party candidate Ron Avery ahead by a large margin in the race for a House of Representatives seat. The winner was really Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar.

Not just regular folk reported being unable to vote.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters at a campaign stop near her home in Chappaqua that her daughter, Chelsea, had been turned away at a Manhattan polling site because her name did not appear in a book of registered voters. She was offered an affidavit vote, similar to provisional ballots used in other states.

In South Carolina, Gov. Mark Sanford was rebuffed because he didn't have a voter registration card. He later returned with it.

According to an exit poll of 11,798 voters conducted for AP and television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, about 46 percent of voters said they felt "very confident" their votes will be counted accurately. In 2004, that figure was 50 percent.

But Florida showed a significant increase _ forty-seven percent of voters were "very confident" in their states' ability to count votes, up from 38 percent in 2004. Though it was the site of the voting debacle of 2000, Florida has had relatively smooth elections since, including Tuesday's midterm election.