Voters waited in a long line with filled U.S. Senate ballots in hand Tuesday morning after a new voting machine broke down.

That left the Frazer United Methodist Church polling place in Montgomery with one working tabulation machine for part of the morning. A poll worker at the site said the crowd was also bigger than expected, which made the problem worse.

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Workers had fixed the problem before 10 a.m., according to Christopher Turner, the assistant director of elections for Montgomery County.

“It’s all brand new equipment (being used) in Montgomery County for the first time,” Turner said. “It’s kind of a shakedown cruise.”

But it was far from the only problem on election day in Alabama.

National and state voting rights groups said by late afternoon they had received more than 300 calls from Alabama voters with concerns about long lines, confusion over ballots and complaints about not receiving their absentee ballots.

“The complaints came from voters across the state,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan group based in Washington, D.C. “They make clear that there’s much work’’ to do in Alabama in terms of voting rights issues.

Election Protection, a coalition of more than 100 civil rights and voting rights groups, set up its national hotline (866-OURVOTE) to field calls from Alabama voters.

Clarke called the volume of calls “out of the ordinary. This is a very active day.’’

The coalition also dispatched a team of volunteers, including lawyers and law students, to monitor polling sites. Volunteers came from several groups, including the Lawyers’ Committee, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Aunna Dennis, senior national coordinator for the Lawyers’ Committee, stopped by three polling sites in Montgomery early Tuesday, including a church complex.

She said there seemed to be confusion at some polls, including poll workers telling voters they had to use a provisional ballot if they were deemed inactive. She said voters, however, should have been allowed to vote using the regular process if they showed proof of their address.

“We’ve heard from other folks in Montgomery and other parts of Alabama that they were inactive,’’ she said.

There was also some confusion over party-line voting, volunteers said.

Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said there were also reports of problems with scanning machines and long lines.

“That could be a positive sign in terms of the number of people turning out,’’ said Simelton, whose group hosted get-out-the-vote rallies across the state this past weekend.

He said there may have also been confusion among new voters.

There were also some concerns about police showing at some sites, Simelton said.

“Hopefully that will not deter some of our voters from coming out,’’ he said.

Clarke said there were also problems of misinformation on social media. She said some voters received text messages saying their polling sites were changed. And on Twitter there were some posts with inaccurate information, including the wrong date of the election.

Clarke said the coalition is investigating those and other complaints.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said early Tuesday that voter turnout had been “good” but was still projected to be roughly 25 percent. Merrill said of the 3.3 million registered Alabama voters, about 835,000 are heading to the polls across the state.

In Montgomery County, voters fed their completed ballots into the new DS200 scanner and tabulator machines in the same way as the county’s old M100 machines. But Turner said the M100s were already preowned when the county bought them two decades ago, and it was time for an upgrade.

He said the new machines are expected to be much more reliable.

A few other issues have caused some confusion in Montgomery.

The short U.S. Senate ballot features two sections: The option to vote a straight party ticket, and then option to vote for either Doug Jones or Roy Moore. Turner said there was no truth to a rumor circulating online that marking one choice in each section would invalidate your ballot.

If a voter marks a straight party selection and also selects an individual candidate, the machine would read the individual candidate choice as that person’s vote, Turner said.

Some areas where also voting in a state primary race for Alabama Senate District 26, a vote that’s being treated a separate election. Turner said that requires separate voter validation tables and separate tabulation equipment on different sides of the polling place, but voters still enter through one door. That’s not always an easy, especially at smaller polling places.

“We expected there to be confusion over the fact that there were two elections at the same place on the same day,” Turner said.

Andrew Yawn contributed to this report.