Two to three votes might have been affected at three other locations: Meadow Elementary and Snow Springs Elementary in Lehi and Greenwood Elementary in American Fork. In all three cases, the ballots might have mistakenly displayed the races for U.S. House Districts 2 or 3. Again, neither race was close.

Utah County Elections Coordinator Sandy Hoffmann said the county had to prepare 45 different ballots for its 118 polling locations because of different voting districts and federal, state and local races.

Peterson told the election board that next time, his department will not use the shortcut to program the encoders, even though he estimated it will take five to six times longer.

Despite the unseen programming error in Utah County, supporters of electronic voting have praised the system for catching the mistake.

Hoffmann told the elections canvass board that her emphasis in training poll workers on the limited legal use of provisional ballots caused additional confusion in the first minutes of the election. Hoffmann and her staff also told poll workers during that time to wait for initial troubleshooting to proceed before handing out paper ballots.

"That's not something that was legally allowed," she said. "This is something that will be part of their training so if this should happen again, heaven forbid, and I don't think it will, they'll be prepared."

Utah County residents cast 2,871 provisional ballots. After investigating each one, Hoffmann's staff determined that 82 percent were legitimate, and they were counted. Utah County sent out 3,741 absentee ballots, and 59 percent were returned.

Utah County Clerk/Auditor Kim Jackson is stepping down in January. He chose to run for a different office. Bryan Thompson ran unopposed on Nov. 7 and earned 99.4 percent of the vote.

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E-mail: twalch@desnews.com