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The names of registered Philadelphia voters are not showing up on voter rolls and poll workers are instructing them to vote using provisional ballots, according to voters and poll workers in West and North Philadelphia. Provisional ballots, if they are counted, are not counted until up to seven days after the election.

“We think it’s a real concern,” said a staffer at The Committee of Seventy, which monitors elections in Philadelphia. Voter ID, he says, is “not the central problem in Philadelphia today: [it’s] the messy administration of this election. The phones are just ringing off the hook. We’re fielding calls about people who are not in the polling books.”

Some poll workers are not even instructing people that they can file provisional ballots, and other voters are reportedly just walking away in frustration.

Poll workers and Obama campaign volunteers are anxious at the Acelero Learning center (23rd and Montgomery), where an estimated fifteen registered North Philly voters have been forced to vote using a provisional ballot.

“Their names are not in the books,” says Gwen Howard, a clerk who has worked this precinct (32 ward, 15th division) for years. “Something different. Some have [registration] cards and are not in the books. And you know they come every four years…They were pretty upset.”

The Committee of Seventy had raised concerns that the City Commissioners, elected officials who manage city elections, were not processing late voter registrations quickly enough. Seventy Director Zack Stalberg wrote in a letter that up to 20,000 registrations were still unprocessed in mid-October, “raising the possibility that potential voters will not be registered –or know whether they are registered –in time to vote on Election Day.”

“We have alerted the City Commissioners,” says the Seventy staffer. “They are looking at the problem. Probably fair to say that they seem to think it’s not that big an issue. But I will say this: we can’t link it to the backlog issue per se, but it’s hard for us not to at least wonder about that.”

27-year old Caitlin Conyngham’s experience lends credence to that theory. Conyngham says that she updated her registration after moving, but was rejected because of what the City Commissioners described as a clerical error: her street name had been entered into the computer system, by hand, incorrectly. She appealed and was sent a voter registration card issued October 22.

“I went today to go vote and I was not on the roll at all,” says Conyngham, who votes at West Philadelphia High School. “They had to call the city and I spoke with someone from [Commission Chair] Stephanie Singer’s office. She said, ‘This is really strange. I have you as a registered voter…but you don’t have a polling place attached to your name.'”

Conyngham was instructed to cast a provisional ballot–and she observed another person being ordered to do the same. It was a chaotic scene, she says.

The Commissioners, who have spent the year engaged in fights with one another, have a phone number with a busy signal.

Some names are appearing on a “supplemental” list, according to one Obama volunteer in North Philly. But he says that appearing on that list alone does not allow someone to cast a regular ballot.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” says Democratic 23rd ward committeewoman and poll watcher Lisa Starks, emphasizing that the names of even long time voters are not showing up.

One West Philadelphia voter who contacted City Paper says that she saw two voters at 42 and Ludlow who were required to cast provisional ballots.

That’s what happened to 27-year old Jesse Seitel at 52nd and Willow.

“I had the registration that had been sent to me and it had my name and street address on it,” he says. “I got there and my name wasn’t in the book.” Seitel is angry. “It was total bullshit.”