Voting going smoothly so far, Bowen reports

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California Secretary of State Debra Bowen reported no serious problems from any of nearly 23,000 precincts as voters hit the polls Tuesday morning.

The state hotline, (800) 345-8683 (VOTE), was getting about 100 calls an hour, as opposed to about 1,000 calls per hour during the 2008 presidential election, according to Bowen’s staff.

Bowen said most of those calls came from people asking where their polling place was and whether they were registered to vote. Others wanted to know whether it was too late to drop their vote-by-mail ballots at the post office. The answer is yes. But voters who are still holding on to those ballots can drop them off at any polling place in their county by 8 tonight, when polls close.

-- Jack Dolan in Sacramento