Big Turnout Means Lines For Voters Across City.

New York City's antiquated voting system buckled, groaned and occasionally even gave way on Tuesday as millions of people thronged the polls to cast votes in the presidential election. Persistent problems from past elections -- broken machines, long waits and confusion among poll workers -- were made even worse, voters and election observers said, by an exceptionally heavy turnout. The city's mechanical-lever voting machines, in use since 1962, broke down in neighborhoods from Washington Heights, Harlem and the Upper West Side in Manhattan to Cobble Hill and Crown Heights in Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens. While the Board of Elections dispatched teams of technicians around the city, voters who had already waited for hours had to wait even longer to fill out emergency paper ballots. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]