Pocahantas Allen has been a poll worker for several elections and was ready for a heavy turnout at her West Philadelphia precinct on Tuesday.

“We were expecting a lot of people coming out because this was history,” she said.

And there were more people than usual, but not the hordes she was expecting.

“There were 330, and we usually get about 200,” Allen told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

And then there were the problems.

“When it came time to close the poll, something wasn’t right with the machines. When the paper came out to show you the results, to let you know the count, it wasn’t on the paper,” Allen said.

Elections officials were called, but the workers felt set they had been taken for a ride.

“The first thing we said was it was rigged; it was a setup,” Allen said. “It’s gotten to a point where people are giving up because they always do something to tamper with the voting machines.”

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, voter-protection groups logged about 750 complaints throughout Pennsylvania in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, at least 150 of them involved voting machines.

By 8:40 p.m., there were 73 calls to the NAACP/BlackAmericaWeb.com’s 1-866-MY-VOTE1 hotline to register complaints, most of them in or near Philadelphia.

Jonah Goldman of the D.C.-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights told the Inquirer that heavy turnout was expected and that with more than 215,000 first-time registrants, some problems were anticipated.

The Lawyers Committee also ran a voter assistance hotline to track problems. Callers in some wards reported machine malfunctions, names missing from registries and long waits for provisional ballots.

As expected, Pennsylvania's Democratic voters were overwhelmingly white and -- as usual in Democratic contests -- there were more women than men. Clinton drew her usual strong support among older voters and white women, and won the votes of white men. Those white men, especially blue-collar workers, have been the swing group in most Democratic contests. She even split with Obama the votes of whites under 30 years old, a group that has favored him in many states. Obama won the support of 89 percent of black voters and 51 percent of college-educated voters of all races. Twenty-eight percent of Obama's supporters were black, and half had college degrees.

Obama, the Illinois senator bidding to become the first black president, won support from 89 percent of blacks, a bit better than usual with a group he consistently dominates. Black voters were only about one in seven Pennsylvania voters, somewhat smaller than average in Democratic voting so far.

Dorothy Douglas said the crowds were heavy when her neighborhood polling place, located at a church, opened Tuesday. She said she waited until the morning rush-hour crowd had thinned out before walking to vote. Driving, she said, wasn’t an option.

“You couldn’t find a parking space on the street or on the church parking lot,” Douglas told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Douglas said she voted for Sen. Barack Obama. “I was just so impressed with him from the last convention and he seems like such a fair person," she said. "He seems to care. It’s as simple as that.”

She said her friends were split between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, and that has led to some lively discussions, to put it mildly, especially with the intense sniping between the candidates.

“Some are extremely emotional. One girl, I told her don’t call me anymore. She knows it’s an election, and it’s going to be dirty pool, but it just bothers her,” Douglas said.

Joan Roach, an Obama supporter, said she was surprised at how almost evenly split many black Americans in Philadelphia were between the candidates.

“I don’t think we’re ready to elect a black man. We should be but we’re not,” Roach told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Roach said she initially considered voting for Clinton, but the negative campaigning turned the tide.

“I done swung completely over to the other side,” Roach said. “If she’s going to be this petty over a campaign, is she really going to do any better once she’s in office? I decided no, no, no.”

The support of Philadelphia’s black mayor, Michael Nutter, and Gov. Ed Rendell for Clinton also contributed to the division among black Philadelphians, Roach said, but she also thought Nutter’s hands were tied.

“The governor helped the mayor win, so he’s gotta go along with the political machine,” she said.

Allen said turnout should have been better, but she thought a lot of Philadelphians -- particularly poor, black Philadelphians -- were fed up with politicians.

“We saw a lot of Obama papers, and his posters were on everybody’s doors and windows. We figured it would be a big turnout,” she said.
 
After the machine malfunction was worked out, she said, the count confirmed there were 330 votes.

“That’s all day, from 6 o’clock this morning up until 8 o’clock tonight,” Allen said. “(Voters) are fed up ‘cause even the politicians don’t do what they say. They don’t give you no service; you can look at the community and see how we live. It’s pathetic.”

Poor people, she said, don’t believe that it matters who is president because they are not convinced the quality of their lives would change.

“People are tired," she said, "and they’re giving up. They feel that there is no hope.”

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Bobbi Booker, reporting from Philadelphia, and Associated Press contributed to this story.