ASHINGTON - Remember the apathetic, disaffected Americans who didn't care about elections?
Yesterday, early evidence suggests, a surprising number decided to vote after all. Waiting in lines that spilled out of polling places, they overwhelmed election officials in some jurisdictions.
In St. Louis, a judge ordered polls to stay open three extra hours to accommodate the overflow, but was later overruled. A judge denied a similar request in Detroit.
While final numbers were not available, anecdotal evidence indicated a rise in voter turnout for this year's hotly contested presidential race. If true, that would reverse decades of almost uninterrupted decline, as measured by most analysts. (Some specialists dispute that turnout is falling, however, arguing that the past decade's flood of noncitizen immigrants distorts the data on voting-age population eligible to vote.)
''It seems like it's going to be a reasonably good turnout,'' said Thomas Patterson, codirector of the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard University.
After ticking up in 1992, voter turnout dropped to 49 percent of Americans old enough to vote in 1996, the lowest level since 1924.
Experts were cautious about the early reports of surging turnout, which also showed a sharp increase in black voters.
Analysts attributed any increase to the closeness of the Gore-Bush race, as well as intensified voter-mobilization efforts by the major parties, unions, and interest groups. Organized labor spent its money on such efforts rather than traditional campaign advertisements, Patterson noted.
''The get-out-the-vote effort this year is probably unprecedented in scale,'' he said.
The Republican National Committee spent nearly $50 million and had 100,000 volunteers working to get out the vote. The Democrats spent about $30 million and used 50,000 campaign workers. The pro-Democratic unions added another 100,000 workers to the effort.
Also, the media bombarded voters with polls saying the race was too close to call.
''If the increase in voter turnout is significant, it is because of all these polls we have that essentially said to the people, `It's a close race,' and they said, `We might make a difference,''' said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
Democrats generally benefit from higher turnout, most specialists think, because their voters are often less motivated about going to the polls. But if Republican get-out-the-vote efforts also were responsible for this year's surge, the presumed Democratic advantage of higher-than-projected turnout could be diminished, Patterson said.
Still, it was Democrats who implored judges in St. Louis and Detroit to keep the polls open later. Those urban centers tend to vote Democratic.
In St. Louis, Circuit Judge Evelyn Baker said the Board of Elections ''failed to live up to its duty to the voters of the city.'' She ordered the polls kept open until 10 p.m., three hours later than planned. But later, a three-judge appeals court panel closed the polls there shortly before 8 p.m.
In Detroit, US District Judge Bernard Friedman denied the Gore-Lieberman campaign's request to keep the polls open three hours beyond the 8 p.m. closing time.
