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4:35 p.m. -- Virginia election officials discounted a complaint by the McCain campaign today that paper ballots had been stored in an open duffel bag at a polling place in Hampton.
       

Susan Pollard, a spokeswoman for the State Board of Elections, said the duffel bag had been used properly to transport ballots to the polling place at Jones Magnet School in Hampton.
       

The McCain campaign said a Republican Party observer alleged that the ballots were accessible to passersby.
       

Pollard also urged people who haven't voted to do so as soon as possible to help avoid snarls at the polls this evening. The state expects a surge at the polls between 5 and 7 p.m.
       

The state continued to experience record turnout, despite bad weather and equipment problems at some polling places. At one point, one Chesapeake precinct had as many as 1,000 people in line, accounting for 50 percent of the registered voters of the precinct.
       

Pollard dismissed reports that people are being turned away from polls illegally. However, she confirmed that State Police are investigating reports from the Charlottesville area about deceptive phone calls directing people to the wrong polling places.
       

4:27 p.m. -- U.S. District Judge Richard L. Williams has ordered Virginia officials to protect any overseas ballots arriving after 7 p.m. pending the resolution of a suit filed yesterday.

The suit was filed against officials with Virginia State Board of Elections in federal court in Richmond on behalf of McCain-Palin 2008 Inc., which wants an extension of 10 extra days for overseas military personnel from Virginia.

William H. Hurd, a Richmond lawyer representing the McCain campaign, said that some jurisdictions in the state did not send absentee ballots out to the military 45 days in advance of the election as required and that as a result, some may be returned late.

Williams told lawyers on both sides yesterday that he thought the matter was close "to a no-brainer .... I can't believe you could not reach an agreement on all of this."

But Robert A. Dybing, representing the three sued board of elections officials, said he was only appointed late yesterday and because of today's voting he was having difficulty communicating with his clients.

Dybing said that once the suit was served yesterday, the board of elections told local election officials to safeguard any such ballots. Williams gave Dybing until Nov. 6 to respond to the suit and said that a hearing would be held on Nov. 10, if necessary.

Hurd said following the hearing that it was not known how many such ballots there may be. He said it could be "in the thousands."

3:31 p.m. -- Richmond election officials said they have not seen serious allegations of voter suppression, although one precinct worker was reminded not to ask people who got their vote.

"We don't discuss that with voters," Registrar J. Kirk Showalter said she told one precinct chief.

Told that the state was looking into allegations of campaign workers "pouncing" on voters, Showalter said the city does not attempt to police comments made beyond the 40-foot perimeter around polling places where politicking is prohibited.

One woman was arrested outside of the poll at the Whitcomb Court recreation room in the East End after she flicked a lit cigarette at a police officer. The woman was upset because she no longer was qualified to vote in the precinct, Showalter said. The woman was arrested and charged with littering.

Two workers from opposing campaigns got into a fistfight outside the poll at George Wythe High School in South Richmond, she said.

Voting was heavy in the city this morning, with one precinct reporting that 600 people had voted by 8 a.m. The lines had lessened considerably by mid-afternoon and voting officials weren't concerned about the evening rush.

"I don't expect the predicted 'sky is falling, two-hour lines' to materialize," she said.

Showalter also defended Richmond's touch-screen voting machines. She discounted reports that portions of the ballot were left off the screen. 

"These machines are extremely reliable," she said. "It's not like part of the ballot dissolved."
 

3:24 p.m. -- By 10 a.m. today, about 40 percent of Virginia's registered voters had cast their ballots, according to state elections officials.
 
That figure does not include more than a half-million absentee ballots that the state had already received.
 
Nancy Rodrigues, secretary of the board of elections, this afternoon called the turnout "phenomenal" and noted that some polls opened with 500 people in line.
 
She said registrars are urging people to vote before 4 p.m. if possible to reduce the strain on the polls tonight. The polls close at 7 p.m., but if you are in line at 7, you will be allowed to vote.
 
She said officials have received many reports of issues at the polls, but "the reality is we have not seen a pattern of widespread problems."
 
There have been some allegations of voter suppression in Richmond, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake -- that people outside the polls are "pouncing" on voters headed inside to ask about how they're voting.
 
Rodrigues said 25 percent of the polling places in Virginia use optical scanning machines, which have run into problems in today's wet weather. Voters hands get wet, they handle the ballots and that causes problems in the machines, she said. Voting officials whose precincts have these machines are putting paper ballots in locked box until they dry, and later tonight they will run them through the machines.

1:53 p.m. -- By 10 a.m. today, about 40 percent of Virginia's registered voters had cast their ballots, according to state elections officials.
 
That figure does not include more than a half-million absentee ballots that the state had already received.
 
Nancy Rodrigues, secretary of the board of elections, this afternoon called the turnout "phenomenal" and noted that some polls opened with 500 people in line.
 
She said registrars are urging people to vote before 4 p.m. if possible to reduce the strain on the polls tonight. The polls close at 7 p.m., but if you are in line at 7, you will be allowed to vote.
 
She said officials have received many reports of issues at the polls, but "the reality is we have not seen a pattern of widespread problems."
 
There have been some allegations of voter suppression in Richmond, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake -- that people outside the polls are "pouncing" on voters headed inside to ask about how they're voting.
 
Rodrigues said 25 percent of the polling places in Virginia use optical scanning machines, which have run into problems in today's wet weather. Voters hands get wet, they handle the ballots and that causes problems in the machines, she said. Voting officials whose precincts have these machines are putting paper ballots in locked box until they dry, and later tonight they will run them through the machines.

1:05 p.m. -- In Montgomery County, the voter registrar's office has set up a bus shuttle to ferry voters to the St. Michael's Luthern Church E-1 precinct, where parking spots are hard to find because 5,864 people are registered to vote at the precinct.

State law generally calls for precincts to be split once the number of registered voters to 4,000, said registrar Randy Wertz, but a late rush of registrations among students at nearby Virginia Tech deluged the little precinct.

However, he said, even if he had wanted to, he couldn't have created another precinct: The General Assembly earlier this year agreed that no new precincts would be created in the state until after the 2010 census.

The bus at the St. Michael's precinct runs from 12:30 p.m. to the closing of the polls.

12:51 p.m. -- The political battles aren't just raging between candidates today. Critics of Virginia's election system are fighting with the people who run it.  

The Election Protection Coalition, a group of non-profit organizations that say the state isn't doing enough to ensure that people can vote, alleged today that voters waited for hours at a Henrico County poll because the machines broke down and no paper ballots were on hand.

Judith Brown, a representative of Common Cause, said in a media conference call that voters waited for four hours at the MathScience Innovation Center  in Henrico because five of seven machines broke down. She said the precinct also did not have paper ballots available.

Henrico Registrar Mark J. Coakley said that none of that is true.

One machine did not work initially because it did not pick up the wireless signal that starts the machines, but Coakley said poll workers started the machine manually. He said it did not cause a long delay in voting, so paper ballots weren't necessary.

However, Coakley added, the poll had enough paper ballots on hand to accommodate 10 percent of the registered voters in the precinct.
 

12:42 p.m. -- At Southside Baptist Church on Iron Bridge Road in Chesterfield, David Roy felt that he and other voters had no privacy. They were handed a paper ballot to fill out, then had to stand in line with that ballot. Precinct officers had some folders for voters to use to conceal their ballots, but Roy said there were only about a dozen to go around.

"I had to practically beat the woman down to get one from her," said Roy, who was voting in Chesterfield for the first time. "They really screwed up."

12:23 p.m. -- Louisa County had a voting machine malfunction at its Holly Grove precinct during early morning voting, said Registrar Christy E. Watkins. "We had a technician go out [to fix it] and we had a spare machine, so it didn’t take long to get that resolved," Watkins said.

12:16 p.m. -- In Petersburg, paper ballots had to be used for about 30 minutes this morning after a problem with the electronic voting booths. Paper ballots were used at Good Shepherd Baptist Church, Walnut Hill Elementary School and Union Train Station.

11:02 a.m. -- A voter at Clover Hill High School said the scanning machine broke this morning, and voters were told to put their ballots in a separate box.

"They said they would be counted but I was real leery about it," she said.

10:54 a.m. -- Chesterfield voters were unhappy this morning when they were redirected from Hening Elementary School, where the line was short, to Southside Baptist Church, where waits exceeded three hours.

The Southside Baptist precinct was created after the primary election in February, when voters had to wait long after the poll closed at Hening to vote and the precinct ran out of ballots.

"It's terrible," said Ron Morgan, 63, who said he was not notified that he had been switched from Hening to Southside Baptist. "It's either gross miscalculation or gross negligence by somebody."

Michelle Taylor, 36, estimated that she waited for three hours and 25 minutes to vote at Southside Baptist, where all votes were tabulated by one optical scanner. "I'm very disappointed in the one counting machine...If it wasn't for the extent of how bad the economy is, I'd be walking away," Taylor said.

Election officials said that 1,163 people had voted at Southside Baptist by 10 a.m., or about 31 percent of the 3,688 registered voters in the precinct.

10:32 a.m. -- Chesterfield County's registrar says things have calmed down since the early morning rush, but he confirmed that wet paper ballots had caused jams and other problems with machines.

Lawrence C. Haake III said that at least two optical scanning machines have had to be replaced at voting precincts.

"Things seem to have calmed down a little bit after the morning rush," Haake said.

10:29 a.m. -- A voter called to say he'd been in line at Maymont Elementary School in Richmond for an hour and a half, and a poll worker just told him it could be another three to four hours before he gets to cast his ballot.

10:03 a.m. -- In Galax's north precinct, electronic machines did not allow early voters a chance to cast a ballot in the U.S. Senate race, said resident Debbie Adams.

"There are two machines, and both of them wouldn't bring up the senate screen," said Adams, who arrived at the precinct at 6 a.m.

"About 10 people voted before they realized there was a problem. They tried to fix them, but within 25 minutes they finally gave up and went to paper ballots. But that was only because they were pressed by voters. And when they gave us paper ballots, they gave us pencils! I said, 'We can't do this,' and then they gave us pens."

9:45 a.m. -- Susan Pollard at the State Board of Elections gave a briefing on election issues across Virginia.

Across the state, three precincts out of 2349 total opened late, including one in Virginia Beach and one in Richmond. She said two of those three opened late due to "human error." There were reports that a Richmond precinct opened late because the librarian who was supposed to unlock the doors slept in.

Other problems?

* In some precincts, voters experienced problems because optical scanning equipment was not working properly. In other locations, people were filling out ballots with wet hands and clothes, which caused problems with the machines.

* Also, voter calls are accidentally being dropped by the state board's call center.

* In Petersburg at Walnut Hill Elementary, the wrong machines were delivered. No other information available.

9:24 a.m. -- Catherine Canty has voted in the same Chesterfield precinct for 16 years, but today she was told she wasn't registered there, her husband said. Instead, polling officials said she was registered to vote in the city of Richmond and the city of Norfolk.

She went home to get her social security card and was able to vote eventually, her husband said.

9:08 a.m. -- While two-hour waits were not unusual this morning in Richmond and some of its immediate suburbs, delays of half that duration were not sitting well in some of outlying areas.

In Dinwiddie County, Linda M. Brandon, the registrar, said she had workers put up orange traffic cones to keep voters in line after some people frustrated by waiting one hour in a line that stretched out the front door of Grace Baptist Church went around to the back of the church on River Road and tried to create a second line.

8:54 a.m. -- The voting machine problems at Godwin were due to a problem in the machines' wireless communication systems, registrar Mark Coakley said.

He attributed the problem to human error.

8:20 a.m. -- The broken machines at Godwin were repaired around 6:45 a.m. Poll workers estimate the longest wait at about an hour.

In the interim, voters were given the choice of waiting for the one working machine or using paper ballots.

8:12 a.m. -- Voters report problems throughout Chesterfield with the system of feeding marked ballots into a machine for reading.

In Matoaca, a man who said he was sixth in line today had his ballot jam in the machine, so he fed it into an emergency slot instead. Voters report problems at both Swift Creek Elementary School and Swift Creek Middle School.

Bonnie Kettlewell, of Midlothian, said long lines at Robious Middle School are feeding into one machine there. She waited only 40 minutes but predicted, "It's going to get ugly."

8:07 a.m. -- Election officials in Hanover County are replacing a voting machine at one precinct, and reporting paper jams or other problems at three other precincts.
 
The machine at the Farrington Fire Station is being replaced because of paper jams, said voter register Robert M. Ostergren.
 
He said that for the most part things are moving along again at the other three precincts that reported problems: Ashcake Volunteer Rescue Squad, Pole Green Elementary School and Oak Knoll Middle School.
 
In many cases, machines were rejecting ballots because people were inserting them improperly, such as by jamming them too hard into the machines, Ostergren said.
 
Hanover has 34 voting precincts.

8:02 a.m. -- This morning's swell of voters created predictable results on some routes that are already infamous for rush-hour commuters.

In Richmond's West End, for example, the Cary Street Road corridor -- typically bottlenecked with morning commuters trying to get downtown from Chesterfield County and other points south and west -- was all the more choked by the establishment of a polling station at First Presbyterian Church at 4600 Cary Street Road.
 

7:56 a.m. -- Voters are reporting problems throughout the region, with only one of seven machines working at Godwin High School in Henrico County, wet paper ballots jamming machines at Swift Creek Middle School in Chesterfield County, and machines not showing the presidential race at Jahnke Road Baptist Church in Richmond.

Election Protection, a non-partisan organization monitoring voting, said it has received reports of problems at more than two dozen polling places throughout the state, but especially in the Richmond and Chesapeake areas. The problems include the improper use of provisional ballots instead of paper ballots at locations where voting machines are malfunctioning.

Bob Dickinson said he witnessed stacks of paper ballots being left unattended at Godwin High School this morning. He said a poll worker threw up her arms in dismay, but he saw the same thing happen again. "It's an interesting morning at the polls," he said.

7:55 a.m. -- In Botetourt County, Nancy Scheie, 66, of Buchanan said the electronic voting machine she used at Buchanan Elementary School did not give her a chance to cast a vote for president, taking her instead to the Senate and U.S. House of Representative races.

"They set me up in front of the computer and I got no help. The screen for president never showed up. I complained, and they said I'd already cast my vote for president. I feel like I've been duped, like I've been totally taken advantage of. I was so excited about voting for president because I'm tired of the way things have been going. I just wish they'd put a piece of paper in front of me, a paper ballot, then I'd know what I was doing."
 

7:50 a.m. -- Voters report that Precinct 308 in Richmond, at a Richmond library, opened late because a poll worker overslept.

7:36 a.m. -- In Chesterfield, one voter in the Bermuda district reported that poll workers had trouble feeding paper ballots into the machines because the paper was wet from rubbing against voters' clothing.

She had to wait 45 minutes for her ballot to properly feed into the machine.

7:29 a.m. -- Henrico voter Audrey Belford, who experienced the machine problems at Godwin, reports: "I arrived at 5:15 and was about 10th in line.  When the polls opened at 6:00 I would estimate about 3-400 people were there.  Of the 7 voting machines, only one was working.  Apparently they are wireless and only one “found” the signal.  I was able to vote within about 15 minutes and the poll officials were considering offering paper ballots as I left.  If the machine malfunction were not worked out, I can only imagine what a mess it is by now."

7:21 a.m. -- Voting-machine problems have now been reported in Hanover County, too.

At Pole Green Elementary School on Pole Green Road, voter Audrey Hingley said she had to fill out three separate paper ballots before the voting machine would accept one because the machine was jammed.

"A guy had to open it just like you would a copying machine," she said. Many other voters had to fill out multiple paper ballots, she added.

7:17 a.m. -- Chesterfield voter Jim Robinson reports: "I just got back from the Chippenham Precinct at Hening Elementary School in Chesterfield County and there were at least 150 to 200 people in line at 5:30 AM.  They will never catch up.  I plan to go back mid morning but its going to be awful."

7:08 a.m. -- The State Board of Elections has received reports that some touch-screen voting machines in Henrico County are malfunctioning.

Voters at some Henrico precincts are using paper ballots, the state board confirmed.

7:05 a.m. -- As the morning rush hour evolved and crowds swelled at polling places, police in many locales were called to help direct traffic around voting sites.

"We're going to have problems all day," one Richmond police officer said.

Areas for traffic complaints included polling stations at Southampton Baptist Church and J.L. Francis Elementary School, both in South Richmond.