By DEBORAH HASTINGS
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 8, 2006; 1:43 AM
-- Election Day was tainted by complaints of dirty tricks, with some voters reporting intimidating phone calls, misleading sample ballots and an armed man questioning Hispanic voters outside a precinct.
Nonetheless, poll watchers said voting across American went relatively well despite long lines in Denver, a Democratic lawsuit in Ohio and a longshot Texas candidate who briefly, and incorrectly, was shown with a wide margin.
"For 7,800 jurisdictions in this country, it looked like things came out pretty cotton-pickin' well," said Doug Lewis, executive director of Election Center, an nonpartisan organization of state election officials. "There were some problems, in some states, but overall it looks like all the predictions of disaster turned out wrong."
As polls closed nationwide, one of the worst waits was in Denver, where hundreds waited long past sunset at beseiged polling centers. They continued to wait, 90 minutes after the 7 p.m. close of voting. It was a miserable end to a day fraught with new voting machine problems and the longest statewide ballot in decades.
"This is positively ridiculous," said Jack McCroskey, who leaned on a cane while waiting to vote. "At 82, I don't deserve to have to stand out here."
Voter intimidation accusations prompted others to claim that some voters were bullied from getting a chance to vote.
In Virginia, where a Republican George Allen battled Democrat Jim Webb in a race too close to call, the FBI was looking at intimidation complaints from voters who reported they received calls telling them to stay home on Election Day, or face criminal charges.
In Indiana, the FBI was investigating allegations that a Democratic volunteer in the college town of Bloomington was found to have absentee ballots after counting had begun.
Other states reported similar problems.
In Arizona, three men, one of them armed, stopped and questioned Hispanic voters outside a Tucson precinct, according to voting monitors for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which photographed the incidents and reported them to the FBI.
In Maryland, sample ballots suggesting Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich and Senate candidate Michael Steele were Democrats were distributed by people bused in from out of state. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Maryland by nearly 2-to-1.
An Ehrlich spokeswoman said the fliers were meant to show the candidates had the support of some state Democrats. They were paid for by the campaigns of Ehrlich, Steel and the GOP. Some of the fliers include pictures of Ehrlich with Democrat Kweisi Mfume, a former NAACP president.
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.