Sunny skies yesterday were a stark contrast to the dreary Election Day four years ago. And despite gloomy predictions, problems that plagued the 2004 presidential election in Ohio never materialized this year.

Lines swelled early in the day and at other peak voting hours in many places, sometimes because of minor glitches or confusion over provisional ballots.

But there were no last-minute lawsuits to keep the polls open and no major controversies like those that made the Buckeye State the poster child for election problems in 2004.

"We're pleased for the people of the state of Ohio," said Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a first-term Democrat who faced relentless criticism from Republicans before the election.

She was under enormous pressure to deliver, after promising to restore faith in state elections. She credited hard work, preparation and cooperation with county election boards, as well as her order to have paper ballots at the polls in Franklin County and other counties with touch screens to help reduce lines.

Those ballots may help delay final results into today, and Brunner said it doesn't appear that voter turnout will hit the predicted 80 percent. But a key factor in helping reduce congestion and pressure on the polls this year was the dramatic increase in early absentee voting.

The campaigns and elections officials pushed early voting heavily, and about 273,000 people in Franklin County - nearly a third of all registered voters - cast absentee ballots by mail or in person Downtown at Veterans Memorial before the election.

That meant that after the early rush of voters when polls opened at 6:30 a.m., many precincts were slow for the rest of the day.

With a little more than four hours until the polls closed yesterday, for example, about 85 percent of the registered voters assigned to Maple Grove United Methodist Church in Columbus had already voted.

That was good news for Election Day workers at the polling place at the corner of W. Henderson Road and N. High Street, but bad news for members of the church holding a bake sale.

"The bake sale isn't selling anything because nobody is here," presiding judge Rich Lillash said. "The women were complaining. I told them most everyone had voted."

Helen Radwan, who braved the lines at Veterans Memorial to cast an in-person absentee ballot, even surveyed the brisk, smooth process at a Northwest Side precinct yesterday and felt a twinge of buyer's remorse.

"I waited 3 hours and 45 minutes on Saturday," she said. "Now I'm not entirely sure why. Next time, I'll request an absentee ballot."

Even at Kenyon College, where students famously waited up to 10 hours to cast ballots in 2004, voting was a snap for most students and others.

"I got here five minutes ago," said Dave Vick,', a Kenyon College freshman, as he exited the Gambier Community Center east of Mt. Vernon in Knox County late in the morning.

One of the major complaints yesterday involved provisional ballots, which are cast by voters lacking proper identification, failing to update their address, or not appearing in the poll book. Their ballots are held for 10 days while elections workers check voter eligibility.

There were widespread complaints of voters being forced to cast provisional ballots when they should have received regular ballots, as well as confusion because some provisionals were handled at the same tables as regular paper ballots.

In Franklin County, officials discovered a database glitch that could have forced as many as 35,000 voters to cast provisional ballots.

The board told poll workers to work around it but didn't know how many people were affected..

Another major issue involved voters not being sent to the correct precinct and mistakenly being forced to cast a provisional ballot if they had a valid driver's license with an old address.

Ohio has had the second highest number of provisional ballots of any state in 2006, and the increasing trend is troubling, said Donita Judge, an attorney who worked on the non-partisan Election Protection Coalition in Columbus.

Of the 270 people who voted at Sawyer Towers on the east side of Columbus, for example, 170 had to cast provisional ballots.
After hearing complaints that some voters were wrongly being asked to vote provisionally, the Franklin County Board of Elections sent a message to the cell phones of all presiding judges at polling places reminding them of the rules.

Board chairman Bill Anthony tried to assist a voter who showed up at the wrong precinct. He located her correct precinct and sent her there, but once there, poll workers tried to force her to cast a provisional ballot because the address on her driver's license didn't match the poll books.

Anthony told the workers that the woman was entitled to cast a regular ballot. They didn't buy it, even from Anthony.
"They don't understand what the law is," he said.

Police responded to Hope Lutheran Church on Lilley Avenue after complaints that a man in front of the building was telling voters that their provisional ballots would not be counted.

An estimated 5,000 Franklin County residents who cast absentee ballots also are expected to receive notification by mail that they made an error on their ballot envelope that must be corrected by Nov. 14 for their vote to be counted, officials said.

There also were scattered reports of machine glitches and other problems, including one touch-screen voting machine in a Knox County precinct that for a while would only cast ballots for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

At least three young voters in the Whitehall school district, which had offered to register voters at schools, also were turned away because last-minute registrations had not been submitted to the county elections board on time.

"I'm not allowed to vote, and there is nothing I can do about it," said Andrew Wolford, who turned' in August and was looking forward to casting in his first election. (Read more about this issue on the E-Team blog.)

Long early-morning lines and lots of unhappy provisional voters affected Ohio State University-area polling places yesterday, but few other problems cropped up as thousands of students voted in their first presidential election.

Sleepy Ohio students were in line before the polls opened, many with plans to return to their beds after voting. They came early, they said, because they were excited about voting and feared long lines later in the day.

For several blocks along N. High Street in the campus area, Barack Obama supporters waved signs and banners at passing cars. His supporters also were at each of the five polling places, passing out sample ballots and bottles of water.

McCain supporters rallied voters only at the Jesse Owens Recreation Center, one of the main OSU student polling locations.
Lorna Cervantes' alarm rang at 3:50 a.m. yesterday so that she could vote.

The 49-year-old packed up a folding chair and some beverages then headed off to her polling place at Dodge Recreation Center and snagged the first place in line, saying she learned her lesson in 2004 when she waited four hours to vote.

"I was not going to wait in line like that again this time," she said.

Dispatch City Editor Carol Ann Lease and reporters Tim Doulin, Jeb Phillips, Suzanne Hoholik, Spencer Hunt, Todd Jones, Randy Ludlow, Kathy Lynn Gray, Rita Price, Jill Riepenhoff, Paul Souhrada, Ray Stein and Sherri Williams contributed to this story.