After a campaign that City Council incumbents have called one of the most arduous of their career, voters and campaigners alike relaxed a little yesterday to wait for the polls to close.

"Today has been exceptionally pleasant because both sides have been considerate, have shared food and ideas," said Elizabeth W. Flaherty, who canvassed yesterday outside City Hall for Councillor William H. Walsh.

"All these people--we are on two different sides of the fence yet we're having coffee together," said Salim E. Kabawat, a backer of the Indepdenent slate.

This year's race has been heralded as one of the more exciting in recent years because three council members are not seeking re-election, leaving it to voters to decide whether the liberal Cambridge Civic Association should gain a majority on the council for the first time in many years and what the future of the city's rent control system should be.

As voters trickled in to decide who among the 28 candidates will sit on the nine-member City Council come next year, campaigners joined each other for doughnuts, coffee and a rare moment of dialogue.

But the atmosphere was hardly non-partisan. "We've been comparing the food," said Paula Lovejoy, a campaign worker for the Independent slate. "We had peanut butter and jelly from the [Working Committee for a Cambridge Rainbow,"] she said of the fledgling group that backs radical reform of city politics. But she added, "You'd think they [the Rainbow] would come up with something more creative," pointing to one Indepedent candidate who prepared a Portuguese speciality for the polls.

If the Rainbow's food was not a crowdpleaser to some, its politics were, according to many voters questioned in an informal survey at the polls yesterday.

"I came primarily to vote against 1-2-3 and for the rainbow coalition," said Ray J. Dupree, a rent-control tenant.

And Catherine B. Hoffman, who canvassed for the working committee outside the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, said she was surprised how many voters recognized the slate, and many voters said it was one of the things that drew them to the polls.

But residents said that, more than any other issue, Proposition 1-2-3 drove them to the polls--leading to the highest turnout in six years, with about 27,300 residents, or 57 percent of those registered, voting.

Nearly all those queried said they voted against the referendum, which supporters have said would give people who would otherwise never be able to own homes the opportunity to purchase them. Opponents to the measure argue that it would cripple the city's rent control system by severely depleting the supply of rent-controlled housing in Cambridge.

"I came to vote mainly for the 1-2-3," said Dorothy A. Adams, one of the few voters who said she supported the measure. "I've lived for six years in a rent-controlled apartment, and I want the opportunity to purchase it."

Many voters criticized the referendum as a blow to rent control, saying that it would turn Cambridge into a "little Boston" and calling it "a scam by the realtors to get their hands on rent-control property."

"I'm in a rent-controlled building, and if rent controls are out of Cambridge, I would probably have to move to another city," said Rebecca L. Herelerode.

Residents said they questioned the accuracy of figures used by 1-2-3 to show the economic benefits of the proposition and said they feared the referendum would be a blow to the city's much-touted diversity.