The chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group, Edgar Bronfman Jr., arrived at his regular polling site yesterday at Hunter College on East 68th Street expecting to cast his ballot. But he, like many other New Yorkers, quickly found out that voting in this year’s presidential election was not quite so simple.

Mr. Bronfman, whose music company represents everyone from Bare Naked Ladies to Josh Groban, was greeted with what became a familiar refrain in polling precincts across the city and the country. Because of discrepancies in connection with his registration, he would have to fill out a paper ballot, which would be counted later.

Mr. Bronfman took the mishap in stride. “I was surprised there was a problem,” he joked to The New York Sun, “since the other three times I vot ed this morning went without a hitch.”

At 12:40 a.m., ABC News reported that Senator Kerry had taken New York’s 31 electoral votes with 3.9 million votes, or 58%, to 2.8 million for President Bush, or 40%.

Yesterday’s mishap highlighted shortcomings in the city’s election procedures. While problems did not crop up everywhere, many New Yorkers grappled with long lines, broken voting machines, missing registration logs, and a confluence of other snags.

Election watchdogs and volunteers fielding phone calls from the record number of voters said early in the day that the city was ill-prepared for the crowds, and that the election infrastructure was overwhelmed. By early evening the voter hotline at the independent, nonprofit New York Public Interest Research Group had logged more than 3,000 calls, nearly double the 1,800 calls it fielded on Election Day 2000, officials of the organization said.

“This is probably worse than what we’ve ever seen it,” said the government reform coordinator at Nypirg, Neal Rosenstein. “There are more people turning out to vote than in previous years, and people are more sensitized to their voting rights. I don’t think we’ve ever seen this many glitches.”

Mayor Bloomberg, too, complained. Jammed phone lines at the city’s Board of Elections were “unacceptable,” he said, saying agency officials had better “get their act together” by next year. In 2005, city offices are on the ballot.

“We had offered them some help but they wanted to preserve their independence from the administration,” the mayor told reporters after voting at P.S. 6 on the Upper East Side. “If you call and you want to find out where to vote, you shouldn’t have to encounter a busy signal, or at least not for very long.”

The executive director of the city Board of Elections, John Ravitz, defended his agency, saying that while the infrastructure was overwhelmed, the agency was doing everything it could to respond swiftly.

“On the technical side, there is only so much we can do with the lines that Verizon has given us,” he said. The agency’s telephone lines were jammed Monday and its Web site was down for much of the day. Yesterday the board had a text version posted, but it was still nearly impossible to get through to its phone bank.

Mr. Ravitz said he had requested $20 million to upgrade equipment and operations before the last city budget but received only $4.5 million, which was needed to implement new election requirements such as adding translators in some precincts.

Mr. Rosenstein said that there was blame to be shared and that the city would have questions answered once the dust from the election has settled.

At the very least, the Nypirg official said, the city should have offered some of its employees a day off in exchange for volunteering at the polls, which are notoriously short-staffed.

The administration, Mr. Rosenstein said, should also put more pressure on Albany to change the law so that partisan district leaders are not responsible for selecting inspectors at poll sites.

While no legal challenges were reported in the city yesterday and many voters waited patiently without complaint, precincts in the five boroughs experienced problems all day.

Voters at nine Brooklyn sites reported misprinted ballots in the congressional race between Vito Fossella, a Republican, and Frank Barbaro, a Democrat. The name listed on the Conservative line, won by Mr. Fossella, was Vito Barbaro.

Other voters filed complaints with Nypirg’s hot line saying poll workers attempted to separate them by party affiliation and told registered independents that they were ineligible to vote yesterday. That would be true in a party primary, not in a general election.

Mr. Ravitz said that he heard of only “one or two” such incidents, and the elections board immediately dispatched teams to question the poll inspectors and put an end to the practice. He also said mechanics were being dispatched to any of the city’s 7,694 voting machines that were reported to have problems. At those polling places, paper ballots were used as backup until the machines were fixed.

Mr. Rosenstein, who was giving radio and television interviews throughout the day from the nonprofit group’s bustling makeshift office in Lower Manhattan, said there did not appear to be an intentional effort to disenfranchise voters. But, like many voters, he said some poll workers were not properly trained.

While New York City was a lock for the Kerry-Edwards ticket and the state did not have to confront the complications of a close election, New Yorkers placed an extraordinarily high volume of calls to national hot lines to report concerns and ask questions.

NAACP officials attributed that to inadequately trained poll workers and the very high turnout.

A nonpartisan government advocacy organization, Common Cause, reported receiving 15,096 calls from New York City yesterday, with Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens among the top 10 counties in the nation for calls.

Monitors said that in some cases poll workers asked for identification from all voters. Under the Help America Vote Act, voters who registered by mail after January 1, 2003, had to provide photo identification for the first time. That problem was also reported nationally and, like many of the other New York problems, will probably be put under a microscope in coming weeks and months.

Officials from Common Cause said last night that part of the problem was that there was not enough money to finance proper enforcement of the federal mandate.

Others said the money New York State received never trickled down to the counties.

At the polling place at 45 Wall St., where the line snaked down the block in the morning, voters had mixed reactions. Some walked off the line. Others, including a Water Street resident, Elaine Schwartz, said they would stick it out no matter how long they had to stay planted on line.

At P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights, voters waiting in front of the three polling stations noshed on homemade baked goods such as zucchini bread and conducted hearty conversations. The wait for entry to the polling booths ebbed and flowed between 20 minutes and 2 hours.

“You don’t need to vote a certain way to enjoy the food,” said Deneen Thompson, a parent and fund-raiser for P.S. 8. “We’re a nonpartisan bake sale.”