NEW YORK, Nov. 2—She just wanted to get it over with. Fania Washington planned to vote before work, so she headed to her local polling place at about 8 a.m. But after waiting in line for about an hour, the Midtown woman found her name wasn’t on the registration list.

She went home to get her voter registration card and presented it at the polls, but the poll workers still couldn’t let her vote.

So she took her case to court – literally.

Washington ended up in election court, the place voters can go for on-the-spot adjudication if they encounter problems at their local polling places. The court, manned by State Supreme Court justices who volunteer for duty, handles everything from missing names on registration rosters – the most frequent complaint – to people who pulled the lever on the voting machine too early and cast a blank ballot.

Each borough has at least one such court, located at the Board of Elections office; Manhattan has two, one in lower Manhattan and one in Harlem. After the justices hear petitioners’ sworn testimony, they decide whether to sign a court order instructing poll workers to allow the voter to cast a ballot. “You ask some questions and decide on credibility,” Justice Michael Stallman said. “If they’ve taken the time to come to the court, it means that much to them. Our job is to make sure anyone who’s turned away from the polling place who has the right to vote gets to vote.”

This morning, one of the busiest on record in the lower Manhattan court, the biggest problem the two judges encountered were people who registered at the state Department of Motor Vehicles and then found their registration had never been processed. The vast majority of petitioners got a court order allowing them to vote, and they rushed out, back to the polls, clutching it. The few people whose petitions were rejected shuffled out with their shoulders slumped, their eyes down, their lips tight. Those few were turned away most often for being registered outside New York City and – in the case of one woman -- for having no address at all.

The woman, Cynthia May, swayed into the room under the weight of a bulging backpack and carrying six stuffed plastic bags. Her hair was neatly cut and clean, and her eyes were bright, but her toenails were crusted and black. May is homeless, but she had come to election court to petition to vote.

“I’m not on the list,” May said, her forehead wrinkling. “I have voted but not for a while. What steps can I take? I want a way to register and vote today.” She folded her hands in her lap and waited patiently while the court checked her records.

After some confusion about May’s previous address and several attempts to locate her name on any voting list in any of the five boroughs, Justice Robert Lippmann had to turn her away. Without any previous registration records, “there’s nothing to show that she [lives] in Manhattan,” he said. “That’s a sad case.”

Many petitioners expressed frustration about their experience at the polling places, being turned away or told different things by poll workers, but said they took the time to come to election court because they wanted their vote counted.

Today the court was busier than Stallman had ever seen it in his five years of volunteering. “The court opens at 7 a.m. because the theory is that it will take people about an hour to go to the polling places and find that there’s a problem,” Stallman said. “I came in today and found a dozen people waiting.” During the brief lulls in activity, the two judges and their court reporters, clerks and stenographers sat around the three folding tables of their makeshift courtroom reading the papers, drinking coffee and joking about “the customers.”

Petitioners, having waited in voting lines, had to wait more at the election court for their chance to go back to waiting at the polls. But most left happy. A young women, her wild blond curls whipping behind her, scurried out with her court order, cradling her infant daughter, pausing just long enough to exclaim breathlessly, “That was hard, to come down here, especially with a baby, but, well, it’s important.”

Washington’s husband, Trevor Peterson, said the couple decided to come to election court because they didn’t trust the affidavit ballot and wanted to vote on a machine. “They’d already made a mistake once [leaving Fania’s name off the list],” he said. “What’s to say they won’t lose the affidavit ballot?”

Agreed Washington, “I’m a registered voter, and they kept trying to get me to do an affidavit ballot, but I said I didn’t want to do an affidavit ballot. I want to be able to vote the way I want. I was, quite frankly, horrified.”

Washington had her court order from Lippmann within five minutes. When the judge handed it to her, she held it up to her chest and, grinning, gave it a little shake between her clenched fists before heading back to the polls.