In the second day of early voting, touch screen machines failed and had to be replaced. Voters quickly lost confidence in the election process.*

Lines snaked out from the library's small windowless conference room, which doubled as a makeshift precinct. Waits of two or three hours were not uncommon at many of the county's eight early voting sites.

... Seeing all this, Jane Weidman of Boca Raton said she had lost confidence in the system.

"We are all here because we're afraid our vote is not going to count on Nov. 2," she said. "We can't vote. It's like Afghanistan. We're all in a long line. What's going on here?"

... Democratic poll watcher Rhoda Stern-Moss cleared up the mystery.

"They tried to boot up the machines this morning and they wouldn't go, so they ordered new ones," she said. "No big deal."

It was a big deal if you had waited a total of five hours in line Monday and left without voting, then spent three more hours in line Tuesday — Boca Raton resident Ann Dean's complaint.

"I voted, but my machine froze," he said. "They fiddled around with it, then they closed it up. They gave me another card and I went to another machine."