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Voting going smoothly statewide

Wisconsin voters faced lines of up to an hour on Tuesday, but election workers reported few serious problems.

The longest lines came when polls opened at 7 a.m., poll observers said. The crush of voters who arrived early resulted in waits of up to an hour at some sites in the state’s two largest cities, Madison and Milwaukee.

Election workers braced for another crush once workers started leaving their jobs in the late afternoon. But for most of the day, voting went smoothly except for routine technical glitches and registration problems, they said.

Turnout appeared high in many parts of the state, where temperatures reached in the low 70s. State officials predicted a record 3.2 million votes would be cast.

In Green Bay, 25 percent of registered voters had cast ballots by 10 a.m., city clerk Douglas Daul said. He predicted a turnout of 90 percent of the 60,000 voters that were pre-registered. Daul said he ordered an additional 5,000 ballots on Tuesday afternoon for a dozen polling places that were running low.

The large number of voters who cast absentee ballots before Election Day helped reduce lines, observers said. State officials said such voting was up 50 percent or more in some areas compared with 2004.

U.S. Attorney’s offices in Madison and Milwaukee said they had received no complaints of election irregularities by mid-afternoon.

In Madison, one of the biggest problems was college students who believed they had already registered but were not in the poll books, observer Lissa Koop said. Most of the students were able to reregister without incident, she said.

"Things are going smoothly," said Koop, who was monitoring the election with a nonpartisan group of civil rights lawyers. "Nothing too exciting, which is how we like it."