Poll problems perplex the voters as the lawyers circle

Long queues, circling shoals of lawyers and the potential for confusion and chaos greeted voters across the US yesterday as they turned out in huge numbers to cast their ballots.

Long queues, circling shoals of lawyers and the potential for confusion and chaos greeted voters across the US yesterday as they turned out in huge numbers to cast their ballots.

Early reports suggested a scattering of problems at polling centres as people tried to get to grips with a variety of voting methods, ranging from paper ballots to touch-screen computers.

Party activists and lawyers stood by to do battle in case disputes over voter eligibility grew during the day.

By midday on the east coast, a hotline maintained by voting-rights activists was reported to have logged more than 1,650 queries, mostly related to complaints or questions about registrations and polling locations. Some voters in New York and Pennsylvania complained to the hotline of troubles with non-electronic machines.

The cause of the problem is that the election was not a single event but rather 51 elections by the 50 US states and the District of Columbia, each according to its own rules and regulations. Indeed, within these 51 authorities, individual counties have a degree of responsibility for organising, collating and counting the vote.

It is remarkable that in a country such as the United States where so many aspects of life are homogenised, where a city in the south-west will have the familiar slew of chain stores and chain restaurants that match a city, say, in Maine, there is no standardised procedure either in terms of the way people cast their votes, or in the way that vote is counted.

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said on the BBC's Today programme: "The American election process is a totally obsolete, broken system, at a time when you can go anywhere in the world and get 100 per cent accuracy at an automated teller machine. We need to decisively overhaul our voting system. It's an absurdity that we have not done so."

At polling centres in the battleground states, international monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were on hand to view the day's events. Although they have no regulatory role they said they would be compiling a report on the fairness of the election.

At the same time, a group of independent monitors organised by the campaign group, Global Exchange, said they had been refused access to polling booths in some counties in Florida and Ohio. While the observers had been granted access in Leon County, Florida, Boone County, Missouri, and the city of St Louis, in Ohio's Franklin and Cayuhoga counties and Florida's Broward and Miami-Dade counties officials were refusing to allow them to observe the process.

"I am shocked to find officials are not giving us access," said Sergio Aguayo, a founder of the Mexican electoral watchdog, Alianza Civica. "It reminds me of how things used to work in the old Mexico. It is sad."

Campaigners have long predicted problems with the voting system, pointing out that nearly one in three voters would cast their vote using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticised for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunction. There have also been concerns about the lack of a paper trail, meaning there is no other source of data to check votes against.

Another concern this year has been the introduction of provisional ballots to allow voters whose names are not on electoral lists to cast a vote and have it counted if their eligibility can be proved. The 2002 legislation that brought in the initiative did not specify when the individual states have to count these votes. In Ohio, 250,000 of the votes cast are estimated to have been done using provisional ballots.