Early Tuesday, when United States citizens began to cast their vote in the nation’s 2008 elections for president, some problems were reported in several states including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia, all of which are purple (or battleground or swing) ones, where neither candidate has had overwhelming support during his campaign.

In some locations, the electronic voting machines failed to work, while in others, the devices needed to be rebooted during the voting process, after they had crashed.

Moreover, in various states where the aforementioned issues hindered voters, there were no paper-trail backups to the machines so that Americans could have still voted the old-fashioned way.

Pamela Smith, executive director of Verified Voting, a nonprofit foundation that focuses on improvin the voting system, stated the lack of emergency paper ballots was due to a vague policy with regards to the matter, that did not clearly require all locations be provided with paper-trail backups.

Nevertheless, even where there actually were emergency paper ballots, another problem occurred, when the voting locations ran out of the latter, which is exactly what happened in northern New Jersey around 9.30 a.m. EST.

Other reported mishaps included faults in the wireless communication systems of voting machines in Godwin, Virginia and workers being overheard by voters when joking about how the machines could be rendered to lose all the results they had gathered.

Americans have been called to elect their next president on Tuesday, having to choose between the Democratic Party’s nominee Barack Obama and the Republican Party's one John McCain.