The machine jammed early in the afternoon as several ballots became stuck in a narrow opening in the box. Because of the unexpected large volume of voters at this precinct, even when there were still several hours to go, polling workers were left with few alternatives to shake, hit and slam the machine to no avail. Ultimately, they accepted votes manually.

Despite the complex voting process, malfunctioning machines, and an avalanche of confusing propositions, many local voters didn’t neglect their right to vote.

Kate Harper, 55, was one of these voters, and the last person to enter the Berkeley District 4 polling place. It took her about a half an hour to mark the page-long list of measures. When she finished and submitted her ballot to the election administrator, she watched as her ballot was roughly folded and tucked into a trunk, rather than being processed through an optical scanner.

But she didn’t complain.

“I know how unreliable and inconvenient technologies are, and usually breaks down at the worst possible time. I feel comfortable that my vote will be counted anyway,” Harper said.

Even for Harper, a UC Berkeley psychology graduate who described herself as having a sophisticated sense of detecting political tricks and an ability to “read between the lines,” understanding and making decisions for the page-long propositions was still a challenge.

“I take voting very seriously, and it was a long ballot… I think that for people who are not very sophisticated in logic or politics or how people use rhetoric, it could be very confusing,” said Harper.

It was also confusing for Stephanie Lin, 20, a second year biology student at UC Berkeley, to understand all the propositions.

“I wish I was more prepared because I didn’t actually vote for a lot of things. I didn’t want to make uninformed decision. Some of their description were pretty vague, and I felt like I couldn’t trust just those few sentences,” Lin said.

But other voters invested their time and effort researching the measures and candidates. Angela Chang, a 22-year old Chinese immigrant, spent about four hours last night reading sample ballots and consulting online help Web sites like Smartvoter.com.

“I feel that a lot of people are really apathetic about voting because they think their vote doesn’t matter, that they are just one in millions. But if they don’t vote, nothing will happen, and nothing will impact them… If everyone thought that way, then the democratic system would not work at all,” she said.

Although there was a concern that the complex initiative system might confuse voters, and in some cases hedges them from the voting process – particularly vulnerable the immigrant vote demographic – the day saw a respectable turnout.

“I think we need it because right now we are so poorly lead, and the quality of our legislature is so low,” Chang added.

“There’re always election coverage through mass media (in their language),” said Mary Hayashi, a democrat candidate for State Assembly in District 18 who just won the seat at Sacramento. While believing the government should do more to encourage voters to turnout – for example, providing ballots in different languages – she also emphasize the importance of voters’ commitment to participate in democracy.

“And there have to be some responsibility on part of individuals to speak out. The information (necessary to vote) is there available for them,” Hayashi said.