A handful of voting problems were scattered across Beaufort County on Tuesday as residents showed up at the polls in droves to cast their ballots in several local, state and national races.

The most significant problems reported Tuesday involved city of Beaufort residents who were given county ballots that didn't include the mayor's race, said Agnes Garvin, executive director of the county's Board of Elections and Voter Registration Office.

About 15 people in a Mossy Oaks precinct voting at Mossy Oaks Elementary School were given the wrong ballots but were allowed to recast their votes when they informed election officials about the errors, she said.

There were also some problems involving AccuVote, the machines used to hold and record the paper ballots that have been used in the county since 1999.

At Robert Smalls Middle School, two Burton precincts that should have had their own AccuVote machines were forced to share one unit until a second arrived three to four hours after the polls opened at 7 a.m.

"People thought they wouldn't be counted," Garvin said of the shared ballot box. "People saw us put those ballots in the side of the box and thought their votes weren't being counted, but they were not being mixed."

Paper jams occurred with some machines, and some voters' ballots were not initially accepted because they had not answered every question on the ballot, Garvin said. Under a provision of the federal 2002 Help America Vote Act, set up to avoid a repeat of the controversial 2000 presidential election, machines would not take partially filled out ballots until an official hit a "yes" button to send it through.

"They weren't major problems, it was just managers, humans, panicking," Garvin said of any Election Day hiccups.

There were two occurrences Tuesday of people handing out campaign literature within 200 feet of a polling station, which is illegal under state law.

"We pretty much nipped that one in the bud," Garvin said.

The county's top election official said she thinks some of voters' suspicions Tuesday stemmed from emotions that were still raw from the close 2000 election, but she said that in Beaufort County, such fears were unfounded.

"Everybody's looking for hanky-panky this year, and it's not happening," she said. "At least, it's not happening here."

Unrelated to poll problems, the more than 7,000 absentee ballots filed by voters were being counted into early this morning. The sheer number of absentee ballots -- twice as many as in 2000 -- bogged down the process.