Students read, work on crossword and Sudoku puzzles, text-message and email on hand-held devices and listen to music as they wait up to an hour to cast their first votes in a presidential election.

While there were enough working voting machines in polling stations at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, there was a shortage of poll workers to process the hundreds of first-time voters.

Still, the majority of students remained in good humor. “I’m more excited for the process as a whole than as an individual,” said Jeremy Springman, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh, who said she was voting for Sen. Barack Obama. “I’ll wait, everyone seems to be chilling.”

At the Pittsburgh campus, former Pittsburgh Steeler great Franco Harris — whom few students probably recognized — visited the polling place and urged students to stick out the long wait.

At Central Catholic High School, which is near Carnegie Mellon University’s campus, students waited, without complaint, for 75 minutes to cast their votes. Obama campaign volunteers handed out bottles of water and encouraged them to stay in line. More poll workers arrived in mid-afternoon, which cut waiting time to about 30 minutes.  Obama campaign organizers said they expected a crush of students after classes end.

Dorian Adeyemi, 20, a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, said the long lines were “a testament to how exciting people are to vote,” adding that he made up his mind last night to vote for Sen. John McCain because of his views on economic policy.

Pew, the respected non-partisan research organization, reports that polls that exclude cell phones may be a bit off — and effectively biased against Sen. Barack Obama. (H/T Michael Connery, and Mark Blumenthal has a good summary here.) Based on three recent election surveys:

[T]here were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin… As implied by these results, in each of the three polls, the cell-only respondents were significantly more supportive of Obama (by 10-to-15 percentage points) than respondents in the landline sample.

Regular landline polling is supposed to account for these trends, but Pew concludes that’s getting harder:

[A] substantial minority of the cell-only sample is younger than 30 – a demographic group that has consistently backed Obama this year. Traditional landline surveys are typically weighted to compensate for age and other demographic differences, but the process depends on the assumption that the people reached over landlines are similar politically to their cell-only counterparts. These surveys suggest that this assumption is increasingly questionable, particularly among younger people. (emphasis added).

This finding — even with its caveats — complicates most current polling coverage, which barely discusses the margin of error, let alone inaccuracies in the age and cell sampling.

Republicans have been complaining about a press bias against McCain, maybe Democrats will start flagging the polling bias against their candidate — and his young, cell-toting supporters.

Photo Credit: Mike Kline Flickr