John Gideon, executive director of e-voting watchdog group, in Bremerton, Wash., said before polls closed that the problems he had heard about were pretty much what he expected. "I'm a bit surprised that there haven't yet been any big reports of failures," he said. "Of course, we still have tabulations coming up.

"We haven't had an election yet where the machines haven't failed somewhere."

Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based government watchdog group Common Cause, agreed that the election seemed to have gone smoothly, even with reports about voting delays and machine glitches.

"We know that problems that we predicted are occurring in more than several states," she said, pointing to long lines caused by too few machines, hardware breakdowns, inadequate supplies of paper ballots and other issues. Some of those problems are "leading to people leaving the polls without being able to vote," Boyle said.

At the same time, "we wouldn't characterize this as a meltdown" of the system. "In spite of [the problems], things are going along."