A few glitches mar early voting in Salt Lake City

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Early voters on Election Day faced severe glitches in Utah County and less dramatic problems in Salt Lake County.

Utah County

Voters in more than 30 polling locations couldn't cast ballots early in the morning because of a problem with the state's new electronic voting system.

Election officials created a temporary solution and urged inconvenienced voters to return.

From Lehi to Payson, a small calculator-sized device that encodes plastic voter cards malfunctioned in approximately 32 of 118 polling locations.

The county elections manual included a temporary solution for the problem, Utah County Clerk Kim Jackson said. One voting machine was converted into an encoder, fixing the problem for the rest.

County elections staffers worked over the phone with various poll managers to walk them through the fix. After that, the affected locations had just one machine encoding the ballots instead of two, and one less voting machine in operation, which would have slowed balloting.

Jackson said the crew was working with the system supplier, Diebold Elections Systems, to determine what went wrong.

Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert told KSL Radio that the encoding machines were programmed incorrectly. Jackson called the statement "premature."

"That's not accurate," Jackson said Tuesday morning. "If he's saying that, he's in error."

Jackson said Diebold hadn't determined what the problem was, but acknowledged programming could have been the cause.

"It may end up that way," he added, "but at this point we're still baffled about what caused this problem."

Elections officials began to field calls at 7 a.m., as soon as the polls opened. Jackson said the temporary fix was in place at most locations by 8:30 a.m.

Some polling managers allowed voters to use paper "provisional" ballots until the problem was circumvented, but others did not.

Herbert said the correct procedure should have been to tell voters they could wait or that they could use a "provisional" ballot to cast their votes immediately instead.