Over 2.3 million people voted in person in New York City, including the nine days of early voting, by 9 p.m. Tuesday, according to the city Board of Elections.

The preliminary number doesn’t include absentee ballots. 

Early voting saw massive lines throughout the five boroughs. Today, in parts of the city, the lines weren’t as long. The polling site at the Brooklyn Museum was nearly empty for most of the day, although volunteers stood by with free food and drinks in case of a potential surge. 

Sarah Canfield, who volunteers with Fuel the People, an organization that distributes food and water to protesters and poll workers, was at the Brooklyn Museum last Saturday and the line wrapped around the building. In some cases, it took four hours of waiting in line before voting, she said. 

“That's what we were expecting today,” Canfield said.

Although she didn’t vote at the Brooklyn Museum, she voted at a nearby polling site and had the same experience as people at the museum today. 

“It took me longer to get to the polling place than it did to vote,” she said.

She waited until today to vote because of her work schedule. The one day she did have available to do early voting, there was a “torrential downpour,” as she called it, and she didn’t want to get sick.
 

For Elspeth Shell, she waited to vote until election day because she wasn’t very excited by the choice of candidates. 

But she’s happy with how her voting experience at PS9 turned out.

“It was just the best voting experience I ever had,” she said. “Often there's just lines and lines and lines to wait. But today I put my dog on the railing and walked in. I was out in five minutes.”

That easy experience wasn’t true for everyone in Brooklyn. 

Erica Domenech showed up to vote at 5:30 a.m. at PS29 and wasn’t able to vote for about two hours, she said. 

“There's no communication, nobody's outside yet saying anything,” she said about standing outside her polling site after 6 a.m.

“This young lady was telling us that the site coordinator never showed up,” she said. “So what's gonna happen? Because now it's like, five to six, and we're standing out there freezing.”

Domenech said someone who she believes was the site coordinator eventually explained that they were waiting for keys to unlock the ballot machines. They also had to wait for an internet connection before they could start letting people vote.

“I'm like, ‘What do you need the internet for? Shouldn't you just plug the machines in and they just take it?’” she asked. “I guess this is all new technology they're using.”

Alberto Santiago showed up at his polling site at 5 a.m. at 323 Roebling in Brooklyn. He got there early to try and avoid long lines. But after waiting over two hours, he decided to leave.

“They ended up telling us at 7:30 that the power was out and there was no Wi-Fi for computers,” he said. “We never got inside at all.”

He went home and didn’t come back until 10 a.m. when he was eventually able to cast his vote.

But for people who had tighter schedules, coming back wasn’t always an option.

“I feel like there wouldn't have been that big of a line had we started on time,” said Jasmine Briggs-Rogers about her polling site at George Washington High School in Fort George. “I know some people did leave because they had to go to work.”

Briggs-Rogers and her husband showed up a little before 6 a.m. at their polling site and had to wait until 7:30 a.m. to cast their votes because of internet connectivity issues, she said. 

“They were waiting for a technician,” she said. “One of the polling guys was going, ‘They want us to wait two hours for a technician, but I'm just going to restart it.’ So, eventually, they got it to work themselves and we got to vote.”