Voters can expect extra scrutiny at polling sites across the city today.

While New York is not wearing a battleground-state crown and has had no election-law challenges leading up to today’s presidential voting, the city has 435,047 first-time voters, as well as new federal election laws to enforce.

Nobody is predicting ominous election problems here, but nobody is ruling out the possibility of confusion among voters or delays in getting into booths.

One problem is the possibility that hundreds, if not thousands, of voter registration forms filled out at the Department of Motor Vehicles were never transferred to the database of the city’s Board of Elections. The charge, made last week by Manhattan’s Democratic elections commissioner, Douglas Kellner, and reported by the Daily News, could mean that some voters will show up at their designated polling site to find that their names never made it to an official roster.

Those voters, election officials said yesterday, will be sent to locations in their respective boroughs, where a judge will contact the DMV to verify their registration. If the information is confirmed, the judge will issue an order to allow the voter to cast a paper ballot – not exactly the minimally disruptive Election Day experience most voters hope for.

“It’s incomprehensible,” an official at the New York Public Interest Research Group, Neil Rosenstein, said. “It’s completely inexcusable. I can’t even find the right adjective to describe it.” Mr. Rosenstein is the nonprofit organization’s government reform coordinator.

A spokesman for the DMV said all of the registrations were processed and the charge was untrue and politically motivated. Meanwhile, watchdog groups, including NYPIRG, are deploying their own “election observers” to polling sites to ensure that any problems are reported immediately and that, if need be, violations are challenged in court.

“Usually the problems are from poorly trained or poorly intentioned poll workers,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “But the city realizes that we have these monitors. They realize that our opinion is important and that we’ll be looking for and flagging problems.”

Though New York is virtually certain to be colored blue tonight on the television networks’ electoral maps, experts will be looking for several potential glitches. Voters who registered by mail after January 1, 2003, for example, will have to provide photo identification for the first time, to comply with the new federal election law, the Help America Vote Act.

The general counsel for the city Board of Elections, Steven Richman, said yesterday that more than 30,000 poll workers had been trained in respect of the law’s requirements and that he expected things to go smoothly. Of the 4.5 million registered voters in the city, roughly 50,000 will have to show some form of photo identification, Mr. Richman said.

Poll workers have been instructed to accept anything from a driver’s license to a supermarket club card, but watchdogs are concerned that the requirements will not be administered properly and that some voters will be improperly turned away. Election officials portrayed the agency yesterday as prepared, albeit hectic.

“We’re expecting very heavy turnout,” Mr. Richman said, “but I think the biggest problem we’ll have is the normal quote-unquote rush hours will be even busier.”

The counsel said: “It’s hectic. It’s the normal pre-election craziness. My only hope is that we have clear victors across the city.”

The associate counsel for New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, Wendy Weiser, said that the city was supposed to receive federal money to help implement new requirements and train employees, but that the money had not yet trickled down. That, she said, may be at the root of any problems today.

Yesterday, the phone bank at the offices of the Board of Elections at Lower Manhattan sounded like a casino filled with active slot machines. Phone lines there have been ringing incessantly for the past two weeks, officials said.

Officials of groups that seek to protect voting rights said the gridlock of calls could leave some voters disenfranchised and confused about where to vote.

Several phone calls made by The New York Sun throughout the day to the city’s voting information hotline, 212-VOTE-NYC, were met by messages instructing callers to try again later. Efforts to reach the voter hotline through 311 also failed.

“The phone lines are completely jammed,” the elections board’s spokesman, Christopher Riley, said. The agency’s two phone banks, one at Manhattan and one at Staten Island, received more than 2,500 calls yesterday alone, he said in midafternoon.

Mr. Rosenstein of NYPIRG said that with the addition of the Staten Island site after the 2001 presidential election, the city should have been better prepared to handle the high volume of calls.

Mr. Riley said, however, that his agency is coping with the situation. “This is probably going to be the most highly publicized, contested election of all time,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can to get the people the information they need, when they need it.”

Those watching, and evaluating, the city’s performance today predict New York will pass the test of a presidential election without trouble.

“A lot of people are paying attention to this election, but this city has weathered far more intense things than problems at some polling booths,” said a Columbia University professor, Steven Cohen. “The fact that we have international poll watching overseeing an American election is really the shameful thing.” He teaches at the School of International and Public Affairs.

The head of the special committee on election law at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York said the city was accustomed to long lines and old voting machines. “Half of the election-law litigation in the country used to be in New York, but I think with the recent developments, New York no longer has that dubious distinction,” Laurence Laufer said.

Voting-rights activists concede they are not very worried about a closely contested presidential election here that could require ballot recounting reminiscent of Florida’s in 2000. But they say the local races, too, need monitoring.