Voters queue amid rubble in storm aftermath

Impatient New Jersey voters queued up amid rubble and rubbish left by Superstorm Sandy as election officials scrambled to open makeshift polling stations on time.

In Hoboken, which got hammered during the storm last week, one makeshift polling stations opened 40 minutes late — at 6.40am — with hundreds waiting in the sharp morning chill.

“This is unacceptable. We have been here since six, and some of us before that,” said Adora Agim, 38, a software engineer.

“Yesterday when I called the town clerk, they told me to go to my normal polling place.” As instructed, she’d gone to the designated school, only to find clean-up crews shovelling flood debris and a small sign telling her she must go to a community centre for seniors two blocks away.

When the alternative station finally opened, a volunteer worker came out and told the grumbling crowd: “Please excuse the appearance of this place. Two days ago, it was under two feet of water.”

Garbage and oily mud from the flood lined the sidewalks outside the polling station. Furniture, broken drywall, and plastic bags and scattered items were piled waist-high in some places.

But Agim, an immigrant from Nigeria who was backing incumbent Barack Obama for re-election, said the chaos was not enough to stop her voting. “I have lived in a Third World country where your vote does not matter,” she said. “It’s nice to be somewhere where it matters.”

John Margolis, 46, an investment banker supporting Republican challenger Mitt Romney, discovered when he got inside that the electronic voting machine was not working.

He was told to join another line to fill out a paper ballot. That queue was too long and he decided to return later in the day.

A new storm is expected to hit the New York-New Jersey region still cleaning up after the battering from superstorm Sandy.

The latest brings the threat of 88km/h gusts and more beach erosion, flooding, and rain.

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