It's completely chaotic and those people standing over there have no sense of  -- yeah , all she's doing is shouting at us.  This is why people are leaving. It's completely horrible.

But overall people seemed patient – and irritation was leavened by what might be called democratic euphoria – both ‘small-d democratic ' and ‘big-D D emocratic ,' that is .

I have very strong views on this election I would have stood there all day long. It's worth it, ‘cause you feel so good when you pull the lever. It's exciting today. This is amazing. I've voted here many times. I've never seen a crowd like this.

Every Election Day brings glitches, but Tuesday seemed to have more than its share. One Brooklyn polling site had a machine that would only vote Republican – a situation that was quickly fixed, though not without causing lines to back-up. One Bronx precinct reportedly had no backup paper ballots, which let people vote, when their registration can't be found. Unreliable voter rolls were a widespread problem.

I actually didn't mail the registration, I brought it down to the Board of Elections, and they still didn't register me.

John in Bayside, Queens , couldn't believe after all his effort he had to use a paper ballot. He's still not sure even that will work.

Oh, no. I am going to check that my vote is gonna get counted. I was told by the Board of Elections, I can request a voting history. So if it doesn't get counted, I'll be speakin' to ‘em.

I wait there for an hour. I get inside and they tell me, ‘No, you're actually not supposed to vote [here], you're supposed to vote someplace else. But, two people told me two different places that I needed to vote .

The Board of Elections said it was quickly deploying technicians and other supervisors to trouble-spots throughout the five boroughs. But its office and call centers were overwhelmed, and voters, watchdogs and others were hard-pressed to get through. Spokesman Chris Riley said the Board had expanded its call-center, but conceded his agency's capacity was no match for the massive turnout.

It's been such a last minute rush. We anticipated we'd have a lot of calls. Maybe we didn't anticipate we'd have this volume . We just hope we're able to service everybody.

Voters who waited until the last-minute to figure out their polling place got little help from the Board's website, which was overloaded by hundreds of thousands of hits. Those who did make it through might have read about the Board's, quote, “state of the art Interactive Voice Response system” – another largely un-reachable resource. Much of the machinery that keep track of registrations, voters and ballots clearly needs updating and streamlining. Blair Horner, from the New York Public Interest Research Group, says that includes the 42-year-old voting machines themselves. Under the federal ‘Help America Vote Act,” the machines were supposed to be updated in time for this election. But New York State applied for and received a waiver until 2006.

The old lever machines are gonna go the way of the 8-track, and the state of NY has not decided what kind of new machine it wants to have, and since there was a pass until 2006, that made it easy for them to forget about that requirement.

Horner says New York for once, might have been well-served by Albany 's gridlock. Legislators can watch from the sidelines this time around and learn from other states' mistakes. But updating or not, Tuesday's experience shows that sparkling new machines will only be as reliable as the people – and bureaucracies -- who operate them.