WASHINGTON -- American democracy survived the Nov. 7 general election without any major voting machine disasters, but there were far too many problems to call it a real success, according to a report released yesterday by a nonpartisan election reform group.

Long lines, machine mishaps and inadequate poll worker training in many states -- combined with questions about 18,000 "undervotes" in a hotly contested Florida congressional race -- likely damaged the public's confidence in widespread technological changes made since the disputed 2000 presidential election, the group said.

"Voters were inconvenienced in sometimes severe ways across the country," said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, which released the report. "I think [we] need to work harder to make sure that those individual problems don't crop up again in 2007 and 2008 and beyond."

Millions of voters, including many in Pennsylvania, used new voting equipment for the first time this year because of the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, a 4-year-old law that authorized billions of dollars in federal spending for election reform. Mr. Chapin's group, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, has been tracking the rapid transformation and collecting information on its Web site.

Electionline.org had placed Pennsylvania on a list of 10 "states to watch" because all but four of its 67 counties were deploying new machines in the general election. The organization's report detailed a range of problems, large and small:

Polling places in Lebanon and Lancaster counties stayed open for an extra hour because of machine malfunctions.

One out of every nine voting machines in Lawrence County didn't start at the beginning of the day, but a judge denied a petition to keep the polls open later.

In Westmoreland County, election officials said programmers put the wrong date into some voting machines, causing malfunctions and preventing some voters from casting ballots.

Common Cause, a voting rights group, fielded 2,400 calls from voters in Pennsylvania, more than any other state.

None of the issues led to doubts about final results, and Cathy Ennis, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said officials largely were pleased with the election.

"The counties that did encounter problems resolved them very quickly," she said. Her department currently is conducting a full assessment of how the state performed.

Marybeth Kuznik, a longtime poll worker in Westmoreland County and executive director of VotePa, estimated that several hundred people in the county didn't get to vote because of the programming troubles with the Election Systems & Software iVotronic touch-screen machine.

"Even if it's just a few, every vote is precious," she said. "If you're the person who didn't get to vote because the machine was down, that's really important."

She also argues that officials have no way of knowing if technical malfunctions led to the loss of votes because the touch-screen machines don't print paper trails that voters can check before they finalize their choices. Common Cause, along with many computer experts, supports such equipment upgrades. More than two-dozen states already have a paper-trail requirement.

Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a voting machine examiner for Pennsylvania, said that touch-screen machines already can reprint every ballot for a full recount, making a "voter-verifiable" printer an unnecessary complication and a threat to voter privacy. Also, he has noted that the paper printers didn't function well in Ohio's Cuyahoga County in the May primary.

In Sarasota County, Fla., election officials are conducting an audit of their machines, also iVotronics, to find out why as many as 18,000 voters apparently skipped over a tight congressional race to fill the seat of Republican Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of state at the center of the 2000 presidential election controversy. Republican Vern Buchanan won with a 369-vote margin over Democrat Christine Jennings, who is calling for a new election and blaming the unusually high undervote rate on the iVotronics.

Mr. Chapin yesterday said fill-in-the-bubble optical scan paper ballots could have addressed the question of whether voters intended to bypass the race, but his organization isn't advocating for any specific type of machine.

"I don't think there is one silver bullet technology in voting," he said.

Yet election officials in both Cuyahoga and Sarasota counties now are considering replacing their expensive touch-screen units with systems that include voter-verifiable paper trails, such as optical scanners.

Ray Martinez, a former vice chair of the Election Assistance Commission who now advises the Pew Center on the States, said the federal government hasn't invested enough money into the research of technology that would offer local election officials a better range of choices.

"It's going to take time and it's going to take money. And unfortunately those are two things the EAC has never had an abundance of," said Mr. Martinez, who addressed reporters yesterday alongside Mr. Chapin in the Washington offices of the Pew Charitable Trusts. "We have to have a candid assessment of what is working and what isn't."