Some concerns with the voting process have arisen in the weeks leading up to Tuesday's election, including:

— A translation glitch in California's Korean-language voter guide forced the state to reprint and resend the paperwork to votes. The original Korean translation stated that Proposition 30 would raise the sales tax by 25 cents instead of a quarter of a penny. Korean advocates caught the error and alerted the secretary of state's office.

— Dozens of Orange County voters received ballot envelopes lacking a line for their signature, county Registrar Neal Kelley said. His office received a handful of complaints. Kelley estimates that 40 of the county's 800,000 mail-in voters received faulty ballots.

— In recent years, voters younger than 40 have been more likely to have their mail-in ballots disqualified because of a bad signature match, according to Weir. In Contra Costa County, for example, people in their 20s and 30s comprise 10 percent of mail-in voters but account for 45 percent of ballots disqualified for lack of a signature match. Weir speculated that people raised in the era of computers are less accustomed to using signatures to verify their identity.

— Earlier this year, Secretary of State Debra Bowen raised concerns that the closing of mail-processing centers and post offices could disrupt vote-by-mail balloting. The U.S. Postal Service ultimately delayed its plan to shut down 15 California processing hubs until after Election Day, but Bowen is still urging voters to allow plenty of time for their ballots to get back to county elections offices.